Starling Bank ditches its trademark purple for a new set of fintech clothes | City A.M.
Digital challenger bank Starling has revamped its debit cards, drifting away from its trademark purple colour and turning card design on its head.
The new cards will be in portrait rather than landscape, designed to reflect the way consumers use their cards in real life at an ATM or in a card machine.
“The reason for doing [the card] portrait is that it’s kind of clear that banking doesn’t do things that way anymore,” Starling Bank’s art director Mark Day told City A.M..
“Our lives are largely lived in portrait now, even down to how we use our phones. A bank card in portrait reflects how we actually use our cards today; it’s intuitive, instinctive, and in short: it’s just common sense.”
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Cards for the bank’s consumer accounts will be teal, while its business accounts will be turning navy blue. All customer details, including their name, card number and expiry date, will be on the back of the card, which the bank says improves security by making it harder for spies to copy personal information.
Other players in the fintech space have made similar moves to Starling, including business banking app Tide which turned its cards vertical earlier this year. The decision to switch to a brighter colour will also feel familiar, given competitor bank Monzo’s hot coral pink cards that seem almost omnipresent on London’s streets.
But users can be rest assured that Starling’s purple colours won’t be ever be too far away, and will continue to hold a big presence in the bank’s app and branding colourways.
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“Purple is certainly not going anywhere, and it will remain part of our brand,” Day said.
“Teal has always been in our brand colour palette, and it’s an opportunity to use a distinguishable, recognisable colour so we decided to go with that for our new cards.”
“We’re a digital product, so we don’t have many tangible touch points. [A card] needs to reflect the experience you have in the app, so we decided that we wanted to create something a bit more memorable and delightful to use.”
Starling Bank is in the process of securing up to £80m in fresh funding, sources told City A.M. in May. To date the bank has been funded by a £48m investment from quantitative trader Harald McPike.
Read more: Starling Bank to raise up to £80m, with its eyes set on the RBS prize