Some years ago, if you thought of finance or banking – and you worked in branding – you’d think: serif typefaces. You’d probably also think sedate blues, reassuringly solemn copywriting and serious if slightly abstract motifs: Brutalist-style logos, horses galloping through fields or mysterious women in dark hoods. Then, around the mid 2010s, along came a wave of new fintech businesses and there was a notable shift in the sector’s relationship with branding.

In the UK, many of us think of Monzo and its bright coral card as the forerunner of this, but Cash App had already paved the way in the US. The business launched in 2013 as Square Cash: a payment service that enabled people to send money over app or by email, and then later by text or Bluetooth.

From the get-go, the Cash App brand was doing something different. There was the introduction of ‘$Cashtags’: unique, personalised handles that let people get paid faster and leverage personal branding. There was also its bright green, minimal app interface, which was a far cry from the dinosaur-esque digital services provided by most banks at the time.

Then there’s the long list of partnerships the brand has set up, working with an impressive set of collaborators including Ramy Youssef, Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, Marshall Columbia and A$AP Rocky. And despite reporting 50 million users and over $16 billion in annual revenue, Cash App continues to hang onto its off-kilter take on finance – with an Instagram grid that looks more like a cultural institution than a finance business.

“As the sector has gotten more competitive and the broader macrotrends in the economy have gotten more interesting, with the advent of Bitcoin and all these new financial instruments, there’s a lot more complexity in the space for brands to explain and help educate consumers,” says Kyle Fletcher, head of brand creative.

“For Cash App, we’ve taken a more tonal approach of simplicity, access and really trying to distil things in a way customers can understand with as little education as possible. Can we just make it so intuitive that it’s glaringly obvious and you don’t have to go through four support articles to understand what you’re investing in?”

Striking the right tone, says Fletcher, has been an exercise in adjustment. Over the years, and as the business has expanded into investment and Bitcoin management, Cash App has used its creative output – in particular social media – as a ‘test kitchen’. As Fletcher points out, money is emotional, and a wacky tone of voice or too much of a ‘high art’ or aspirational approach can come off as tone deaf if it’s not handled carefully.

“I think we’re still figuring that out today,” he says. “We’ve had the luxury of a great leadership team who believes in taking risks in the category; that’s not the case everywhere. But our mission is to redefine customers’ relationship with money, and that implies that we should be taking risks and investing in things that are differentiated. That requires creativity, imagination and an overall rally around that kind of thinking. I think it’s a pretty creative environment that we’ve created at Cash App and [umbrella company] Block Inc at large.”

What connects the dots is always that customer need. We have a good foundation of research and intelligence on this, and we layer the creativity into that. It’s a great recipe

According to Fletcher, that creative environment is formed by enthusiasm for hiring “great multidisciplinary taste people and ideas people who don’t find homes in the creative industry as much as they should”, and guided by an internal insights team that is integral to everything Cash App does.

The brand and its comms are shaped by what the insights team discovers around how customers are thinking and what their day-to-day lives are like. They provide quick-hit feedback on campaigns and features, as well as running longer, deeper studies that go on to inform product development. The way Fletcher describes it, the insights team is fully embedded with product design and the wider creative team, with permeable membranes between each group. “What connects the dots is always that customer need,” he says. “We have a good foundation of research and intelligence on this, and we layer the creativity into that. It’s a great recipe.

“If we’re in a critique environment, or there’s differing opinions, I always default to: what is the customer perspective here? And do we need to embrace it? Sometimes there’s some nuance around leaning into what customers want too much – there’s that Henry Ford quote about the faster horse. So sometimes you have to challenge customer perspectives, but that’s what we’re really good at: knowing them, and leaning into what might challenge them in a way that’s stimulating but that they might not have articulated in research.”

This customer-first approach is what’s led to some of Cash App’s greatest hits, including its personalisable card – something Fletcher jokingly describes as ‘the de-NASCARification’ of the bank card. “Increasingly, as we work with younger demographics and the next generation, that’s a table stakes ask,” he says. “People want to customise things. They want to tailor them. And with new products and software it’s getting more democratised. It’s not just a behaviour for the elites.”

Creating their customisable card was an exercise in both patience and perseverance. Stripping out extraneous detail and turning the front of the card into a true ‘customer canvas’ meant persuading multiple vendors to reveal “secret patented diagrams of how the electronics work”, and it also meant keeping everyone at the brand on board with the process.

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“That speaks to the level of absurdity I’m willing to go to as a creative and a creative leader – to get the thing to be how we would like it to be,” he laughs.

It’s a level of commitment that, you’d imagine, isn’t evidenced at too many other businesses. And it’s easy to envision the budget-holding upper management pursing their lips at the time and money committed to something that, to them, probably seems like small fry.

Fletcher characterises it differently and calls the two-year process of finalising the card – as well as his general creative outlook – as “planning for serendipity while spinning many plates”. It’s a philosophy he says he’s tried to embed across the brand and product team, encouraging them to “slowly create things that are pretty magical over time”.

‘Brand’ has become a very malleable word … I’ve started to replace the word brand with ‘vibes’. Vibes seems to focus a conversation to something that is productive

And there’s no doubt that this kind of approach has created enormous value for Cash App. The customisable card alone has been so popular that they’ve been able to attach a $5 price tag to some special editions, like their recent, sell-out pink card. Cleverly, they’ve connected this physical piece of design back to their app, with the card giving users the option to turn the whole app hot pink. At the time of writing, one YouTube ‘tutorial’ around doing this had 25,000 views.

Fletcher likens it to buying skins in Fortnite. “I was convinced out of the gate, after we got into debit cards, that there was something there,” he explains. “After we did the first one, we were like: I think we can do materials. I think this is sneaker culture. We could really go down the rabbit hole, and we just kept going. Our first paid-for card was a $5 glow-in-the-dark card. That’s the opposite of what all the other banks were doing at the time.”

Cash App’s aforementioned partnerships programme has also contributed to its cultural status. Fletcher says the business relies on an internal partnerships team which, like the rest of the brand, is heavily informed by what the insights team is telling them. It’s led to some gloriously unexpected pairings: notably, Doechii talking about money management in a barbershop in a campaign created by Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free’s creative agency pgLang, and Megan Thee Stallion explaining Bitcoin in a video series created by Even/Odd.

With so much ‘risky’ creative work flying about, the next obvious question is how Cash App measures the success of all this time, investment and effort? “I think it requires a full-spectrum approach to brand work,” says Fletcher. “My advice to folks who are wrestling within some of those budget convos: you have to widen the aperture of what brand means.

“It’s becoming a very malleable word, and I’ve actually started to replace the word brand with ‘vibes’ in many conversations. Vibes seems to hone people’s response and actually focus a conversation to something that is productive. I don’t know what that means for the future of brand, but the more you can break down those walls between brand and product development, and be a full-stack, fully integrated team, the better it’s going to be. You’re going to have one voice to the customer, and it’s going to feel authentic because it is. And it gets so fun too. It’s the most fun way to work for me.”

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