Sectors: Fintech

136% ROI – the AI brand strategy remix

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

Getting To The Crux

Cruxy are a specialist data-led growth consultancy who want to position themselves as the authoritative voice in growth intelligence for tech sector private equity.

Our work on the Cruxy brand evolution is already getting noticed, with four nods from the 2026 Transform Awards – shortlisted for Best Creative Strategy, Best Brand Evolution, Best Visual Identity (in two categories, Finance and Professional Services). In reality, the immediate business impact shows Cruxy is already a winner.

Six months post-launch, the revitalised brand strategy is delivering strong ROI results:

  • 136% revenue increase.
  • 20+ media features including Financial Times, Raconteur, Investment Week.
  • 240% web traffic spike.
  • £250 billion+ in additional Assets Under Management secured

These metrics are proof that comprehensive brand coherence delivers what visual identity alone cannot. Cruxy is now a strong brand presence that is visible and referenced across the information ecosystem.

 

Why Brand Coherence Is Music To Your Ears

When Gil Scott-Heron wrote the seminal jazz freeform of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in 1971, he is saying real revolution requires active participation, not passive consumption.

We’re in a revolution right now. We are smack bang in the furnace of the 4th Industrial Revolution, a blurring of the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. And we can guarantee, your brand is creaking at the seams trying to cover all the bases.

Do you know the most visited sites AI agents like ChatGPT and Google Gemini go to when used as a search tool? They are, in order,

  • Wikipedia
  • Reddit
  • YouTube

Generative search eats sentences and sentiment. Old search bars snack on single keywords on your own website. The world is changing fast and how your brand shows up in the world is changing faster.

Visual identity alone won’t get you seen by AI search agents. Graceful brand guidelines won’t define how your organisation exists across the digital ecosystem. As a result, design is shifting from control to coherence; from creating fixed assets to building flexible systems, because this is how to design for both human perception and AI-mediated discovery.

Read on to see how brand coherence works in practice…

Integrated Brand Design Systems

The Cruxy case study demonstrates three integrated brand design layers working as a system.

  • The visual layer creates recognition and trust. The Crux design device, two intersecting lines symbolising precision, provides distinctive visual signature. Dynamic motion design brings the brand alive. This visual treatment immediately signals a rigorous, trustworthy, intellectually formidable brand.
  • The informational layer establishes authority that gets referenced. Working with the Cruxy team we developed a comprehensive brand proposition as “The Calculated Maverick”, providing the framework for structured knowledge architecture that is referenced, cited, validated.
  • The ecosystem layer ensures coherence across all contexts. Brand guidelines work across digital and physical touchpoints. The asset suite is structured for cross-platform consistency, the digital rollout strategy ensures visual coherence and informational validation.

This coherent brand approach positions Cruxy as a source AI agents trust, and maintains the brand’s strategic intent across both human-perceived visual and machine-perceived informational touchpoints.

  • Visual identity gets attention.
  • Information architecture gets citation.
  • Ecosystem coherence builds cumulative authority.

 

Read the full Cruxy case study here

Brand Coherence 4.0

Brand design for the 4th Industrial Revolution requires visual identity system plus information architecture strategy. Or to put it another way, brand guidelines plus cross-platform content ecosystem plan.

Cruxy invested in a comprehensive brand coherence system working across human-perceived and AI-mediated touchpoints. As a result they saw a 136% revenue growth return on that investment in just six months.

Scott-Heron understood that real change requires participation, not spectatorship. We know that real brand evolution, in this very fast changing business environment, requires coherence, not continuation.

You can’t passively continue with traditional brand guidelines and expect coherence across AI-mediated discovery. You can’t be a spectator to this transformation, tweaking your logo and hoping it’s enough. It’s not.

Authentic brand evolution in an AI-mediated world requires active, comprehensive rebuilding of how your brand exists as information, not just refreshing how it looks.

Have you checked what AI agents say about your company? The answer might surprise you.

Is your brand designed for AI discovery, or just human perception? If you’re responsible for growth over the next 24 months and beyond, let’s talk. The brands that win won’t be the ones with tightest message control. They’ll be the ones with most authoritative information ecosystems.

Contact Us

We create strategic brand systems that maintain coherence across visual, digital, and informational touchpoints. We design for  humans and the AI agents increasingly shaping how expertise gets discovered.

Designhouse is where strategy takes shape.

55 Years Building Brands That Last

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

This year marks Designhouse’s 55th anniversary. More than half a century partnering with organisations to create brand work that drives business performance.

Origin Story

We started in 1970, when brand design meant typesetting, paste-up boards, and physical craftsmanship.

Through five decades, we’ve navigated every major shift in how brands are built and delivered; from desktop publishing in the 80s to digital transformation in the 2000s to AI-enabled design today.

But technology has never been the point. The point is what survives the technology changes.

 

Built to Last

Fuller’s Brewery still uses the brand identity we created in the early 1990s, thirty-something years ago. Not because we predicted design trends, but because we built it on strategic foundations that transcend fashion. When Michael, the man who commissioned that work, recently retired, the brand was still going strong. That’s what happens when you invest in design built on business strategy rather than commercial trends.

We’ve seen agencies chase every new tool and trend. Watched big-name studios prioritise principal celebrity over client outcomes. Seen consultancies deliver strategy decks that never get implemented.

Designhouse is an experienced brand design agency. We have always taken a different path: understand the business problem first, apply 55 years of tested experience, deliver work that performs in real markets with real stakeholders.

This longevity isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about earning trust through consistency. With clients like Vodafone, Shell, Centrica, EMCOR UK, and Springer Nature who return because the work delivers measurable value.

 

Future Proof

As we enter our sixth decade, the questions remain the same: Does this brand support business objectives? Will it work under competitive pressure? Can sales actually use it? Does it command the pricing power you need?

The tools change. The wisdom doesn’t.

Here’s to 55 years of brands built to perform, not just to impress.

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

FP Live 2025: the Future of Financial Brands

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

FP Live, Financial Promoter’s annual conference, brought together senior figures from across asset management and financial services. The conversations oreflected a sector wrestling with some genuinely difficult questions about identity, differentiation and trust.

Designhouse Creative Director Peter Dobie joined Tom Lloyd, Ronjit Bose and Hannah Robinson on stage to discuss brand identity across audio, visual and emerging channels. It is a topic with real stakes in financial services. Brand recognition is hard-won and the pressure to modernise without alienating existing clients is constant.

The wider programme tackled the shifting dynamics of global asset management. As well as the growing tension between human-led creativity and automated content. And what it now takes to build a brand that can hold its own in a crowded market. None of these are abstract questions. For firms managing significant client relationships and long investment cycles, brand is increasingly a boardroom concern, not just a marketing one.

We understand the unique pressures the financial sector faces. Our work spans some of the most complex and regulated sectors in business. The themes at FP Live reinforced something we see with clients regularly. The firms that treat brand as a strategic asset rather than a communications afterthought are the ones better placed to compete. The conversation is evolving, and it is good to see the financial sector fully engaged in it.

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

2024 Review

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

2024 was a year of considerable range for Designhouse. Across sectors, scales and briefs, the work reflected something consistent: that strong brand strategy, applied with rigour and creative conviction, produces results that matter beyond the studio. Here is some of what we are most proud of.

New Brands Built From The Ground Up

Bring Energy is a pioneer in city-scale sustainable heating and cooling. We handled naming, strategy and identity from scratch. The resulting brand centres on a multi-coloured palette. This reflects the diverse communities BE serves. The name is designed to do more than identify. The word “Bring”, embedded throughout messaging, gives the brand a conversational quality. As a result the brand name will drive communications for years to come.

For Gulf Oil, a brand with over 120 years of global history, we created something entirely new. Reviva, is a coffee brand extension launching into one of the most competitive consumer categories there is. We developed strategic positioning, naming and full identity. As a result, Reviva made its debut at the F1 Monaco Grand Prix. It has since secured partnerships with Swansea Football Club and the Raffles Hotel.

 

Established Brands Taken Forward

We worked with VEV, the fleet electrification company founded by Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trading business. The output is a contemporary identity built around the interlocked EV letterform. The brand is designed to hold its own in a fast-developing and increasingly crowded sector. The project won at the Transform Awards in April. It was also recognised with a Bronze at The Drum Awards for Brand Development, where the client noted that we combine creative and digital expertise with a genuine sense of being part of their marketing team.

For Cruxy, a deep tech growth consultancy, we developed a brand around The Crux. This ident is a precision design device formed by two intersecting lines, anchored in an electric blue and acidic green palette. The brief demanded a visual language that matched their incisive, data-driven positioning for senior private equity audiences.

TalentMapper  is an  AI-powered talent management platform designed to eliminate unconscious bias. We built a brand around neomorphism principles and a deliberately restrained palette. This stands it apart from a noisy market by playing it quiet, and earning confidence in doing so.

 

Content That Makes The Case

The first edition of the Loan Market Association’s Horizons ESG publication gave us the opportunity to build a brand story around the LMA’s sustainability agenda, drawing on elemental imagery and a flowing design language to communicate a conservation mission in a sector too often dominated by technical language and dense regulatory copy. The work was shortlisted for Content Campaign of the Year at the Financial Promoter Awards, where Designhouse was also shortlisted for Design Agency of the Year.

 

Looking Ahead

In 2024, we worked across sectors. From energy infrastructure to fintech,  consumer brand launches to financial services publications.

What 2024 demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than any single project, is that the principles of strategic brand design are not sector-specific. The thinking that goes into naming a sustainable energy business is not fundamentally different from the thinking required to launch a coffee brand at a Grand Prix, or to give a fintech firm the visual authority it needs in front of private equity. The problems are different. The discipline is the same.

Designhouse works across verticals by design, not by accident. Sector diversity keeps our thinking sharp, prevents the kind of category myopia that produces safe, predictable work, and means our clients benefit from a perspective that is genuinely broader than their immediate competitive set. A financial services brand can learn something from the energy sector. A consumer launch can inform how we approach a B2B identity. That cross-pollination is one of the less visible but most valuable things we bring to a brief.

Wherever the work takes us, the intention remains constant, and ROI is a given. Designhouse is where strategy takes shape.

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

X Marks The Spot for Cruxy rebrand

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

In fintech and deep tech, precision is everything. Your brand needs to work just as hard as your data. It must communicate authority and sharpness before a single word is read. That is a brief Designhouse knows well.

When Cruxy came to us, they had a powerful proposition. As deep tech specialists, they operate a proprietary data engine, Cortex. They map over two billion market data points to identify fast, precise opportunities for growth. The challenge is translating that rigour into a visual identity that senior executives would instantly trust and respect.

The answer came from the heart of the brand itself. We developed ‘The Crux’. This design device is built from two intersecting lines, expressing the pinpoint accuracy and absolute precision that defines how Cruxy works. Paired with an electric blue and acidic green palette, the identity carries genuine energy without sacrificing credibility. Bold, but disciplined. Distinctive, but purposeful.

The tone of voice followed the same logic. Cruxy speaks with authority while actively challenging convention. Black-and-white imagery set against vivid colour delivers a confident contrast. Cruxy is not just another data provider, but a sharp and exacting partner for leaders who demand more.

The result is a brand that looks and sounds exactly like what Cruxy is: incisive, rigorous, and built for the top of the market.

To see how the identity came together across every touchpoint, take a look at the full case study.

 

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

Cruxy Brand Refresh

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

With a refreshed visual identity, Cruxy can now demonstrate how they operate, cutting through the noise to deliver real impact for B2B tech enterprises, with acidic green and electric blue colours to provide a striking and incisive visual experience.

Keep an eye out for our next update to discover how we approached the brand refresh to reflect Cruxy‘s positioning as growth intelligence specialists. Whilst you wait, discover their re-energised website

Designhouse creates strategic brand systems that maintain coherence across visual, digital, and informational touchpoints. We design for  humans and the AI agents increasingly shaping how expertise gets discovered.

Designhouse is where strategy takes shape.

Loan Market Association (LMA) annual conference in London

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

We are pleased to share our latest conference branding work for the Loan Market Association (LMA), which recently featured in their annual conference in London, the biggest of its kind in Europe.

This year, over 800 in-person & 500 virtual delegates had the opportunity to engage and network with industry-leading speakers and draw insights on the current & future projections of the Loan Market.

The goal was to create a concept that positioned The LMA as ‘Representing All The Loan Markets’.

The creative execution brought the vastness of the cosmos to life with a visually striking and all-encompassing design featuring a vibrant colour palette and dynamic graphic device.

The tagline “Further Together”, reinforced the industry’s collaborative, ever-expansive nature and positioned the LMA as a leading advocate for the collective growth of its partners.

It was amazing seeing the identity across various digital, animated and printed mediums within the QEII Centre and online through their streaming platform.

Read more here

Designhouse creates strategic brand systems that maintain coherence across visual, digital, and informational touchpoints. We design for  humans and the AI agents increasingly shaping how expertise gets discovered.

Designhouse is where strategy takes shape.

 

Xceptor Campaign Creative

Posted on by Matthew Gillman

We’re proud to share that our Tax Campaign creative work for automated data solution provider Xceptor has gone live!

To highlight the benefits of Xceptor’s offer, the campaign uses simple illustration, engaging headlines, and human interaction, to create a unique narrative in a sector normally over-reliant on clichéd visuals.

 

Xceptor’s re-brand and positioning strategy helped drive 523% ROI in three years. Read the full case study

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us