Wirex is a borderless digital payments platform for traditional and digital currencies. The platform combines traditional banking infrastructure with blockchain technology, giving its users the choice of making payments with cryptocurrencies or traditional money. The Wirex platform allows customers to store, spend and exchange all your currencies instantly. The Wirex Visa card can be used to pay anywhere in the world in any currency of your choice while earning cryptocurrency as you spend with the Cryptoback™ rewards programme – the first company to offer a loyalty scheme that gives you 0.5% back in Bitcoin with every transaction.

Since 2014, Wirex’s platform has enabled over 2 million customers in 130 countries to make over $2.5 billion worth of transactions between crypto and traditional currencies. The purpose of the payment platform is to bridge the gap between traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies, bringing the benefits of digital money to everyday life. The launch campaign uses the tagline, ‘I pay my way. I pay by Wirex,’ to emphasise the freedom the service creates with a digital account.

Pentagram created the guidelines for a new brand strategy, visual identity and tone of voice that reinforces Wirex’s unique position within the busy FinTech environment. This allowed the Wirex Product Design Team to design the new digital applications aligned to the brand, ensuring consistency across all platforms (mobile, desktop, social, CRM and so on) delivering the optimum user experience for all customers.

The Wirex wordmark is a contemporary sans serif with two distinctive qualities: the brand’s signature double strikethrough in the ‘w’, and a reductive ‘r’ to pair with the brand’s geometric graphic language. The strikethrough comes from the popular graphic element that symbolises currency, as seen in the pound sterling, euro and US dollar symbols. In addition, Pentagram created a library of graphic forms using the double strikethrough to highlight narrative connections and the stories we can tell through financial transactions.

Pentagram used the IBM Plex Sans font family for all communications. The rigid geometric qualities of this typeface establish the sense of a digitally-led, modular aesthetic of the brand’s visual identity; while a vivid colour palette of Dark Green and Light Green are used in tandem with various shades of pastels and greys to differentiate Wirex’s standard and premium payment cards.

Playful illustrations developed by Tatyana Yakunova and a set of icons in the brand colours set a relaxed tone, to again emphasise Wirex as an everyday brand that gives you the freedom to pay your way.