My FT business card was more persuasive and influential than any ad I will ever create.

Years later, I got the chance to build a $4 billion-dollar fintech brand as Creative Director at Papaya Global.

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.

Together, 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 reached 100m+ viewers.

It helped double brand searches (+108%), grow unprompted awareness by +300%, and contributed to record quarterly revenue.

Internally, it gave Papaya’s teams a unified story and a clear north star for creative decision-making.

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