I was responsible for building the brand platform in my role as Creative Director at Papaya Global, a payments fintech that scaled to a $4 billion valuation.

Here’s how I approached that challenge.

Challenge

Payments fintech is a crowded, compliance-heavy category where most competitors sound alike.

Papaya Global needed a clear, memorable brand story that could scale globally, resonate with CFOs and HR leaders, and support ambitious growth goals.

Approach

As Creative Director, I partnered with Papaya’s leadership team and agencies like McCann and Koto to define the company’s positioning, narrative, and tone of voice.

We created the brand platform “How the world gets paid”.

I led the development of:

• The brand platform that defined who Papaya is and why it matters — reframing the company from a payroll provider to How the world gets paid.

• Tone of voice guidelines that gave the brand a human, confident personality.

• Creative expressions of the new identity across advertising, product marketing, and internal communications.

Impact

The new positioning became the foundation for Papaya’s global campaigns, including two Super Bowl ads that doubled brand searches, generated a 300% uplift in traffic, and contributed to record quarterly revenue.

Internally, it gave Papaya’s teams a unified story and a clear reference point for creative decisions.

We announced the visual and typographical elements of the new brand in the video below.