Orbit Financial came to us as a three-year-old neobank with strong fundamentals and a weak first impression. We rebuilt the brand from the wordmark down and redesigned the app end to end.
Orbit Financial had built a genuinely good product — instant transfers, fee-free currency exchange, savings vaults that actually paid out. But customers never got far enough to find that out. Signups stalled at the email screen, app store reviews hovered around 3.2 stars, and every user-research session surfaced the same complaint: "it just doesn't feel like a real bank."
The problem wasn't the engineering. It was trust. The old identity — a gradient sphere and a sans-serif wordmark that read more like a crypto side project than a place to keep your salary — signalled risk at every touchpoint. The app's interface compounded it: thin type on busy screens, a navigation that buried the things people actually opened a bank account to do, and an onboarding flow that asked for a selfie before it explained what the account was for.
Orbit's leadership had tried two rebrands already, both from larger agencies, both shelved. They came to Northbound looking for something less flashy and more honest.
We started by interviewing 22 existing customers and 14 who'd abandoned signup. The pattern was clear: trust isn't built with a logo, it's built with consistency and clarity. So we narrowed the scope to three things, and did each of them properly.
They didn't sell us a moodboard. They sold us a point of view, and then they built it. That's rare.
The visual identity draws from the language of old financial printing — ledgers, bond certificates, the quiet authority of a well-set balance sheet. The wordmark is a custom serif with a slightly squared terminal, designed to hold up at 12px in an app nav and at 4 metres on a mural alike. The accent — a warm clay — was chosen specifically because no other major neobank was using it; it reads warm and human against the cold blues that dominate the category.
On the product side, we rebuilt the design system from scratch in Figma, then shipped the front-end in a shared codebase so the design and engineering teams stayed in lockstep. Every component was documented with the reasoning behind it, not just the specs — because a system survives when the next designer understands why a decision was made, not just what it was.
Six months after the relaunch, the numbers told a clear story. The trust gap closed, and the product underneath finally got the chance to speak for itself.