I learned the power of branding from my first employer, The Financial Times. My FT business card, a tiny rectangle costing roughly a penny to make, was more powerful and influential than any ad I will ever create.

From that moment on, I became obsessed with how brands build fame, and set to work dissecting the success of brands like Nike, Red Bull, Apple. All great brands have one thing in common: they know how to repeat a clear set of messages in endlessly creative ways.

The lessons I learned proved invaluable. Because a few years later, I got the chance to put them into practice 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.