If you want to experience a disorienting sense of perspective on the branding and advertising industry, I recommend having a look through the Creative Review digital archive [available to all subscribers]. Before writing this article, I looked up ‘banking’ and scrolled through pages of half-remembered campaigns intended to revolutionise a stuffy old banking sector.

There’s NatWest in 1983 using blocky graphics to appeal to students, in the days when the aim was to lock people in early and keep their custom for life. There’s First Direct launching in 1989 with a Wolff Olins-created black and white identity and a ‘time-travelling’ ad, where the idea was that First Direct was celebrating its 21st anniversary by travelling back from an impossibly futuristic 2010. Even the future is nine years ago now.

The 90s and noughties saw a succession of campaigns intended to shake up the industry for good – from Spike Jonze directing ads for online bank Egg in 2000, to Abbey’s ‘Let’s turn banking on its head’ in 2003. At the time, Abbey talked about how “The language and communication that banks use is confusing, irritating and patronising” and promised “no more bank jargon” – a press release you can easily imagine coming out today.

All this is not intended as a world-weary ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. But it’s an instructive perspective when you turn to the present-day innovators like Monzo and Starling, two of the most high-profile disruptor brands in UK banking.

Monzo in particular has put a friendly approach to language at the heart of its brand – there’s even a link to its tone of voice guidelines on the Monzo homepage. Like many tone of voice guidelines, it’s 90% a guide to the universal principles of good writing – favouring the active voice over the passive, using shorter words like ‘use’ instead of ‘utilise’, thinking from the reader’s perspective. But it is entertainingly written and its official endorsement of emojis as part of the copy style is a nice reflection of the way many people write online these days. 

Previous attempts at putting a softer face on banks have faltered when the softer tone strains to cover the hard reality. In 2006, Barclays memorably rolled out an Innocent-esque tone across all its branches, with signs reading “Through these doors walk the loveliest people in the world. And you’re one of them” and “Only the nicest people work here. According to our mums.” No-one has established a causal link between this and the banking crash of 2008, but I feel like there must be one somewhere.

When the crash happened, the response of most banks was to double-down on the informality. Where you might have expected some humility and soul-searching, we got the Halifax radio station playing Isa, Isa Baby. The revived TSB brand (a result of competition rules forcing LloydsTSB to split) retreated into brand mysticism, telling a story about values and purpose that went straight from its founding to the present day and skipped all the awkward years in between.

The difference this time is that Monzo, Starling and a wave of fintech start-ups are bringing a different business model to the table. Largely crowdfunded so far, Monzo is able to be more straight-talking and transparent because the content is generally positive. With high-street banks, the business model still relies on punitive charges and arbitrary fees, and no amount of tone of voice will make that sound any better. Branding people talk about transparency as if it’s inherently a good thing, but sometimes a little opacity can be useful. If you’re running an abattoir, there’s a good reason not to install floor-to-ceiling windows.

Last year, I noticed a tweet by ad legend Trevor Beattie talking about a text his credit card lender sent him: “Heads up – your payment for card ending XXX is due today, it needs to reach us by 23.45 to avoid a £12 late fee. Already paid? Nice one.” Tonally, it would slot straight into the Monzo guidelines, but coming from a conventional credit card lender it jars to say the least. Beattie’s tweet was: “Christ. My Barclaycard has started talking to me like it’s a 23-year-old barista in Hackney.”

For now, Monzo can do friendly and transparent because it’s generally not talking about £12 late fees. This may become trickier with the crowdfunding model being replaced by more conventional overdraft charges, but they are no doubt hoping the trust they have built in the brand will make customers a willing participant on that journey. Similarly, Starling is able to talk about ‘Banking. But better’ by highlighting specific selling points, such as breakdowns of your spending patterns and realtime updates on your transactions. As the big high-street banks catch up, it may get trickier to achieve the same differentiation.

That said, the high street banks may not be the fastest to catch up. Last year, NatWest proudly unveiled Cora, its AI-assisted virtual interface where customers talk to a screen-based virtual assistant instead of a real person. It’s hard to understand why NatWest thinks this will be a welcome innovation and not an expensive middle ground between talking to a real person and not having to talk to anyone at all with apps like Monzo.

So what should you be doing tonally if you’re a big bank, or a challenger brand wanting to do something different? Is tone of voice only applicable to nice companies where it’s all good news and bright-eyed innocence?

Well, only if you equate ‘tone of voice’ with ‘informal and friendly’ – which too many people seem to do. There’s a whole spectrum of other tones available – serious, blunt, grumpy, wacky, polite, pushy, charming, traditional – all of which could be fertile territory to explore. If you’re Barclays trying to compete with Monzo, then you can unconvincingly play them at the same friendly game, or you could recognise ‘experience’ as one of your selling points and go for a more grown-up style. Those old Creative Review articles from 1980 talk about banks moving away from the formal image: 40 years on, it might be refreshing if one of them moved back to it.

But if you look at some of the most successful finance brands of the last few years, it’s debatable how much tone of voice plays a major role. What’s the PayPal tone of voice? I use them a lot and I’m not sure. Having looked into it, I can see they mainly employ ‘content designers’ who are more concerned with information design and verbal clarity, rather than policing any particular personality – and it seems to work for them.

Like money, language is a currency – we talk about ‘coining’ a new phrase. At the risk of a strained analogy, you could say that words are like coins – their value lies not in the surface qualities of the coins themselves (the tone), but in the gold reserves that underpin them (the content). The fintech brands that manage to sustain a genuinely new brand positioning will be the ones with something new to say.

Nick Asbury is a freelance writer and one half of creative partnership Asbury & Asbury