The Brief

Traditionally a provider of technical and business integration services to the treasury industry based in Scandinavia, Nordic Financial Services (NFS) was keen to make a number of changes to its business. To begin with, it wanted to become involved in client projects at a much earlier stage, by expanding into the consultancy market. At the same time, it also wanted to change the market’s perception of NFS as a regional service provider. To help achieve this, NFS commissioned Cognito to manage a re-brand and website redesign project that would help it position its global expertise, size and expanded range of capabilities.

The Solution

Cognito’s dedicated team provided NFS with a full range of branding and copywriting services. The first stage was to provide NFS with a new logo and branding guidelines by taking NFS’ key objective - to be perceived as a modern, progressive and global organization - and expressing it visually. Cognito provided simple, striking visuals based on an ellipsis. Additionally, instead of using the company’s full name, Nordic Financial Services, Cognito used the acronym NFS to give the company less regional flavor. This logo and the complementary color palette were used to produce a range of marketing materials including stationery, brochureware and a pop-up conference stand.

Next, Cognito designed and built the NFS website. The site is fully content managed, with a flexible structure to enable easy updates and the rapid addition and removal of pages without any added programming requirements. In keeping with NFS’ global, modern theme, the site’s visuals represent three famous city skylines - London, New York and Hong Kong, merged on the same banner. Cognito also provided copywriting support to ensure that the site content was closely aligned with NFS’ business objectives.

The Results

Following the re-branding project, NFS was able to achieve a clear identity that positions it as a global brand at the forefront of its field - and having a coherent presence across all marketing materials has played a crucial part in this success. The deliverables produced by Cognito are still supporting NFS’ efforts, with the website now providing information portal services to employees, external clients and other stakeholders and the pop-up conference stand being used at a number of international events, including the 2006 Eurofinance international treasury conference in Florence, Italy.