Dutch Digital Design Agency Verve Launches Bold New Brand Identity for Flutterwave

Award-winning digital creative agency Verve has launched its new brand identity and digital assets library for African fintech Flutterwave, which has just been valued to over $3 billion, currently making it the highest valued African start up on the continent.

Speaking about the rebrand, Verve co-founder and managing director, Roman Stikkelorum highlighted how important the close collaboration with Flutterwave’s inhouse team was to ensure the new brand strategy and identity moved fluently across all assets.

“Flutterwave is such a powerful and dynamic brand that exudes the spirit of African entrepreneurship and so our collaborative approach was critical to this, ensuring the brand remained authentically African, while standing out in its category,” says Roman.

“Thanks to Flutterwave’s growth over the last 12 months, its butterfly logo is now a symbol of reliability and trust,” continues Roman. “So we created a modular identity system and motion principle elements around LabaLaba meaning “butterfly” in Yoruba, one of the principal languages spoken in Nigeria and throughout the African west coast.

Speaking about the project, Flutterwave’s head of design, Ted Odalele says: “We saw that Verve would be able to deliver on what we really wanted; a team that cares deeply about showcasing culture and personality through branding.”

“We enjoyed re-discovering ourselves and workshopping the different ways we could retell our origin story,” continues Ted. “Identity is a window to interacting with the world and Verve has given us visual language and tools to do just that.”

To address the multiple touch points brands have to consider, Verve challenged Flutterwave to think beyond its logo and invest in a branding system built from its core. This system can quickly adapt to the ever-changing needs of consumers and move the brand away from the fintech category to one focussed more on the creator economy and its consumers.

“Traditionally the global fintech visual aesthetic is dominated by green and blue, colours that are far too cold and corporate for a brand that prides itself on enabling and empowering African businesses and entrepreneurs,” says Roman.

“So we chose a B2C approach for a traditionally B2B brand in order to resonate with the audacious dreams of entrepreneurs; whatever those ambitions may be. The whole identity and brand strategy is grounded on this single story and pulls through across the new brand and its assets.”

Verve also developed a brand library of guidelines for everything from photography to typography as well as an illustration guide for general brand communications to ensure the brand could evolve and expand for future products and services.

“In this day and age, in order to survive you need to stand out and adapt as a living brand,” concludes Roman. “So we are ecstatic that this project not only met the brief, but combined the best of our skills and Flutterwaves’ to create a brand that is bold and distinctively African and built from the core of classic digital Dutch design and future-proofed, as the company grows from strength-to-strength.”