Financial Services

CASE STUDY

Moneyfarm

Helping a robo-advisor expand to new markets

Challenge

Moneyfarm, one of Europe’s largest digital wealth management companies, had its sights set on entering the German market. When Allianz Global Investors bought a stake in the robo-advisor, the two companies set plans in motion to launch a new multi-asset product in the local market following demand from digitally-native savers and investors.

Prophet was enlisted to facilitate this expansion and to harvest the potential of Moneyfarm’s move into Germany and beyond.

Solutions

We set to work developing an intuitive way to communicate the benefits of this integrated partnership.

The goal was to establish an endorsed brand architecture solution that maximized positive equity transfer between the traditional financial services brand and the fintech start-up; leveraging Allianz’s solid reputation and high awareness in the German market and Moneyfarm’s strong tech and innovation credentials.

We then worked to craft and distil a value proposition and go-to-market strategy specifically tailored to the needs of German customers and the products available to them. Communicating the unique benefit of active returns at passive prices delivered by human expertise with robo-advisory efficiency and precision.

Results

Armed with a brand and strong value proposition that clearly communicates the strategic alliance, Moneyfarm is well on its way to achieving its growth plans. Just one month after its launch in Germany in June 2019, Moneyfarm saw a significant jump in client activation and investments of over one million.

Not only is Moneyfarm well on its way to achieving its growth plans in this new market, it’s also broadening the availability of digital wealth management in a cost-effective and accessible structure.

“Prophet helped us at this crucial moment in our company’s history as we looked to define and execute the right strategy to realize our growth ambitions.”

Giovanni Daprà
Co-founder and Chief Executive at Moneyfarm

CASE STUDY

Sun Life

Developing a brand story that resonates in Hong Kong

Challenge

Sun Life engaged Prophet to reposition its brand and develop a new marketing campaign that would help cut through the clutter and inspire customers to engage with Sun Life versus competitors. Sun Life couldn’t compete in terms of spending and scale, so they needed to develop a brand story that would resonate and a campaign that would stand out.

Solutions

Prophet realized that what the industry was communicating was at odds with what consumers really wanted. Insurance providers spoke about fear and the need to hedge against life’s inherent risks, whilst people hoped for bright futures for themselves and their loved ones. Prophet identified an opportunity to frame insurance as an enabler of dreams rather than a guardian against inescapable peril.

Prophet created Sun Life’s brand positioning leveraging one key insight: consumers in Hong Kong want to dream bigger and live brighter lives—and they want their financial services provider to help. To bring the positioning to life, we translated “Dare to Dream. Live a Brighter Life” into the creative concept of the #BE campaign – “Be everything you want to.” The #BE campaign expressed Sun Life’s promise, that they are here to encourage and challenge people not just to dream, but to turn their dreams into a reality. The campaign was executed across channels including television, print and at various out-of-home touchpoints including street billboards and the MTR.

Results

The new brand positioning and the #Be Campaign drove a lot of impact, increasing brand awareness among target customers and energizing the Sun Life employee and agent base to rally around a refined and inspiring brand story. It gave Sun Life the ability to target the right customers, better articulate the value of their products and deliver a consistent, engaging brand experience for agents and customers alike.

Our work with Sun Life won GOLD for ‘Best creative strategy’ at 2018 Transform Awards APAC.

CASE STUDY

Major Payments Provider

Bridging global innovation gaps through digital transformation

Challenge

A major payments technology company had over many years developed a network of 10 innovation centers around the world. Each innovation center was designed and launched by leaders in different geographies and with differing capabilities, operating models and approaches to serving company account teams and their clients.

While some cross-pollination of ideas and frameworks was taking place, there was no standardized agreement on what might be necessary to drive greater value.

The company recognized that a more consistent operating model was needed, and in 2018 the company decided to move all the innovation centers under a single global leader. This new leader was tasked with driving synergies between the innovation center leaders and establishing a new, universally accepted operating model.

Solutions

The company engaged Prophet to bring the innovation leaders together to rapidly build trust among them and encourage knowledge sharing. From there they could work toward consensus on a go-forward operating model and action plan for putting it into practice.

To start the alignment process, Prophet’s team led the innovation leaders in activities that provided insight into their own preferences and motivations within the innovation process, allowing each leader to meet each other on equal footing. The subsequent knowledge-sharing activities were designed to quickly establish commonality and shared interests. The first two activities were so effective that aligning on the go-forward operating model, key areas for standardization and the action plan was remarkably straightforward.

Results

The team quickly aligned on priorities, an action plan and expectations moving forward.  The head of global innovation and design at the company said:

“Designing and delivering this kind of iconic event for a team of highly independent and experienced innovation leaders (who regularly run these kinds of events themselves for our global clients) required a firm who could confidently bring deep, demonstrated subject matter expertise in innovation, digital product development and event facilitation. I trusted the Prophet team to rapidly get us to breakthrough team dynamics and an actionable plan, and they totally delivered.”

CASE STUDY

Addiko Bank

Regaining brand reputation & customer trust

Challenge

How do you revitalize a bank that’s had serious reputation issues? Following the fallout from the financial crisis and being nationalized by the state, Austria’s Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank (Hypo Bank) was dealing with serious legacy issues. By the time Advent International, a private equity investor, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) acquired it in 2015, consumers’ consideration of Hypo was very low.

Solutions

The new owners knew it needed a brand-new bank, and in January of 2016, Prophet was enlisted to help rebuild it from the ground up. In a matter of weeks, we worked with bank executives to rename it Addiko. A clear signal of change, the new brand name gave the bank a blank slate and a second chance with consumers.

Our research uncovered a crucial customer insight that people in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia felt confused by overly complex banking products. We realized that while most banks pile on more products and paperwork, customers actually want less. They want a simpler, hassle-free way of banking. This led to Addiko’s new brand promise: Straightforward banking that focuses on essentials. That meant becoming more efficient, with shorter queues, and more digital and mobile options. And it called for communicating simply, eliminating jargon, shortening contracts and avoiding asterisks. A clever graphic character, cleanly drawn, walked consumers through the changes, as did a complete advertising campaign.

We also helped Addiko coach employees to “acknowledge and tackle” the challenges they faced. This approach to straightforward banking, which stands for a proactive, optimistic and down-to-earth way of doing business, has become the bank’s mantra.

Results

Since its launch Addiko has seen a robust turnaround, posting positive net results and a listing on the Vienna Stock Exchange, confirming the demand for a specialist player that challenges the traditional universal banks with a simpler and focused model.

Serving its clients with convenience and speed, not only is Addiko now a strong and profitable retail and SME bank, it’s an award-winning one too after scooping six Transform Europe Awards, acknowledging the brand’s transformational journey. The Financial Brand also named it among the most beautiful brand identities in banking.

Addiko’s CEO said, “Strategy is about making choices. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different and we decided to be straightforward. But the Addiko brand does not only represent a name change. It is our new business strategy, our unique positioning, our desire to introduce and implement new, higher business standards, and a new corporate culture. But first and foremost, it is our commitment to improving and changing the way we feel banking should be done. The Addiko brand and this transformation is the starting point for building a better bank. A straightforward bank.”

With brand recognition levels far surpassing that of its predecessor, as well as higher levels of employee retention and customer loyalty than its main competitors, Addiko is on a successful path toward continued growth, with a commitment to improving and changing the way banking should be done.

“The diversity of the Prophet team ensured a very vibrant creative environment, generating genuinely very different alternative creative routes, rather than variations on a single idea.”

Razvan Munteanu
CEO at Addiko Bank

Impact

48.6%

brand awareness in the market 3 months after launch

10.94%

customer consideration after 3 months in market

5x

increase in GAP compared to market average

CASE STUDY

Alight Solutions

Bringing to life a new company’s brand purpose and positioning

Challenge

Aon Plc, a leading global professional services firm, providing a range of risk, reinsurance and human resource solutions, decided in early 2017 to sell its benefits administration and HR BPO platforms. The new company had to determine how to define itself in a relevant, fresh and genuine way, in an ever-changing, tech-savvy and increasingly B2C world.

This task required balance: leveraging the incredible experience of the company and its people, while taking a fresh look at health, wealth, HR and finance solutions; harnessing the power of technology and data, while appreciating that they ultimately exist to take care of people and their families. The leadership team needed to preserve the things that made the new company special while pushing toward a new frontier. The new company needed to define its point-of-view and quickly align around the vision. With three and a half months to do what would typically take a year, it was a race against time, and Prophet and the leadership team needed to be in lockstep in every phase of work and decisive at every juncture.

The challenge was clear – how to articulate and bring to life the new company’s purpose and brand positioning with a new brand name and visual identity that reflected its spirit and intention.

Solutions

Prophet conducted a variety of research studies to inspire the development of the new company and brand. We interviewed stakeholders and customers, and looked at close competitors and emerging startups both inside and outside the category. The research pointed to one important insight – the new company wanted to not only provide security to people, but to leverage its technology platform, data and ecosystem of partners to make it easier for people and their families to thrive in work and life.

Prophet partnered closely with the new company’s marketing group to guide the executive leadership team in defining its brand purpose, values, positioning, new brand name, visual identity and brand voice.

Results

Within three and a half months, the new company defined its reason for being and aligned on how it would express itself. On June 6, 2017, Alight Solutions was introduced to the world. Reflected in its bold visual identity, Alight promises to simplify and enhance work and life by “reimagining how people and organizations thrive.”

By relentlessly focusing on the end-user, leveraging its strong heritage and expertise and creating inspired new ways of working, Alight is charting a course for business growth.

“The work we’ve done together here resonates because we didn’t let the truncated timeframe excuse us from the fundamental steps in the process. We committed to validating across all stakeholder groups: colleagues, customer-care representatives, leaders and clients. The enthusiasm and energy reflects the care we’ve taken to define this bold, new day for Alight.”

Maggie Lower
EVP, Marketing at Alight Solutions

Impact

275k

users of alight.com

18k

followers on social properties

1k

inquiries stemming from website since brand launch

CASE STUDY

UBS

Repositioning the brand and engaging 60k employees

Challenge

Bigger and broader than previous brand campaigns, the one UBS launched was designed to communicate the company’s transformation under CEO Sergio Ermotti. In the several years since he’d assumed the role, Ermotti led UBS through brand repositioning and aligned all business divisions around a single strategy. UBS was finally ready to share its transformation with the outside world and use the brand relaunch to drive further change.

Before launching a more modern, human and unique brand and ad campaign, UBS had to first win over and prepare its most important advocates – the more than 60,000 employees who live and breathe the brand. UBS looked to Prophet for help developing and implementing an employee engagement campaign that informed, inspired and engaged employees.

Solutions

To engage employees, Prophet created a microsite on UBS’s employee intranet and regularly published relevant content. The topics and formats of posts varied, including quirky educational videos on tone of voice, a brand guidelines game and a series of intimate video portraits of UBS leaders and clients discussing the new positioning and direction. Additionally, we struck a partnership with a young, up-and-coming graffiti artist to immerse employees in the brand’s ethos through four large-scale artworks.

Using rigor and strategically-inspired creative thinking, we applied the same best practices of external marketing to deliver effective internal employee communications:

  • Equal effort applied to creating and promoting the site
  • All content must be easy and fun to assimilate
  • Select a few simple messages to communicate and repeat them

Results

The employee engagement campaign has been and continues to be a resounding success, with UBS continuing to win preferred employer awards every year. We initially defined success as having 30,000 employees visit and engage with the microsite, but have far exceeded that expectation as the microsite has now reached more than 62,000 employees. Both employees and top management have expressed how impressed they’ve been with the employee engagement program.

When asked about the brand relaunch, Hubertus Kuelps (group head of communications and branding) told Forbes, “This particular campaign has definitely energized the employee base. It has brought them to a level of pride…I haven’t seen in my communications career.”

Download UBS’ brand relaunch employee engagement content timeline.

“This particular campaign has definitely energized the employee base. It has brought them to a level of pride…I haven’t seen in my communications career.”

Hubertus Kuelps
Group Head of Communications at UBS

CASE STUDY

Zurich

Bringing a financial services brand back to life

Challenge

Zurich Financial Services was becoming just another commoditized insurance company in a sea of undifferentiated providers. Like the rest of the industry, Zurich was too internally focused, with Underwriters, Risk Engineers and Claims Adjusters calling the shots, and a brand positioning that lacked relevance in customers’ lives. Customers who told us they saw insurance providers as non-responsive, slow and untrustworthy – “little more than an organized crime syndicate”. We knew we needed a dramatic change in order to stand out.

Solutions

The idea was simple: We’ll help you deal with the most important things first, like securing a rental car or a place to stay.  Then we’ll help you through the process of restoring your world to order. We’ll put you at the center by delivering REAL help. And in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Zurich launched one of the most extensive global campaigns, introducing Zurich HelpPoint externally and internally.  Our unequivocal promise to customers was that Zurich delivers when it matters.

This could have been seen as yet another empty promise were it not for the vision of transforming 60,000 employees into authentic evangelists of the brand, armed with the permission to identify and execute proactive, spontaneous touchpoints, unheard of in the world of insurance.

Results

In a few short years, the sheer size and ambition of the transformation have been astounding, ranging from internal engagement programs, brand ambassadors, employee awareness-raising tactics, customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics, and the launch of hundreds of new product propositions globally. Revenue, margins and brand tracking scores are all up; and ten years later, Zurich ranks 7th in global insurance brands, and 206th in brands globally by Brand Finance.

CASE STUDY

AIA

Real solutions for ‘The Real Life Company’

Challenge

After a record-breaking IPO, AIA set out a new vision to become the pre-eminent life insurer in the Asia Pacific region. They also adopted a new brand positioning to become The Real Life Company, which promises to “genuinely engage in people’s lives, providing the right financial solutions to them and their families in a constantly changing world.”

Prophet was engaged to develop a brand activation campaign to launch the new brand positioning to employees and agents and to help them understand how best to bring the brand promise to life. We recommended a strategy to engage the target audience by crowdsourcing real-life stories from across the region which speaks to the tangible and inspiring ways employees and agents live up to the brand in their daily lives. This provided substance and proof points for the new brand positioning and made the brand promise real to customers.

Solutions

We themed the brand activation campaign around a people-centric idea – “You Make Us The Real Life Company”.

A series of real life stores were crowd sourced from employees and agents and brought to life through an inspiring internal engagement campaign. The campaign demonstrated how AIA people go the extra mile to take great care of customers and each other in the ups and downs of everyday life.

Results

The campaign has created a simple and memorable brand engagement idea that resonates with everyone in each of AIA’s markets (in multiple languages). Over 11,000 agents in Thailand were introduced to the new brand positioning through 200 workshops conducted over a three-month period.

CASE STUDY

Bank of East Asia

Creating a bold statement in retail banking

Challenge

Bank of East Asia (BEA) is the largest independent local bank in Hong Kong with a large retail branch network. In light of new competition, BEA hoped to extend its reach to customers and enhance its retail visibility. Prophet worked with BEA to create a coherent and impactful brand communication system to help the bank stand out across all channels.

Solutions

The new look is based on a band of five colored “light rays” symbolizing the five core values of the bank. It is designed to project a forward-looking image, making a bolder statement on a street level. As part of the branding campaign, a new tagline “Enriching your world” and four secondary messages have been developed.

Together, they communicate BEA’s commitment to helping customers improve their lives and achieve their goals through the provision of quality banking and financial services. BEA launched its new image through a high-profile advertising campaign including print, bus advertisements, outdoor billboards in the Central, TST, Hong Kong MTR Station, TST Piers and online advertisements.

Prophet ensured consistent delivery throughout the process, from concept to execution, as a long-term partner dedicated to elevating the brand to the next level.

Results

The end result is a dynamic visual and verbal communication approach that brings the brand to life, and significantly differentiates BEA from its competitors in retail environment, enhances the brand visibility and favorability.

Overall, the customers feel very positive about the change, more than 80% of customers reckon that the new look has enhanced the BEA brand image, and the majority of current customers are willing to recommend BEA to others.

Interested in learning more about how Prophet helps companies develop unique brand strategies, create engaging customer experiences and drive business growth? Explore our collection of case studies.

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