When Visa’s founders sat around a table in Northern California in 1969, they could hardly have imagined its metamorphosis from a lending instrument tied to a plastic card, to a global entity processing more than US$3 trillion a year.
Today, Visa is much more than a credit card company and while incremental changes have been made to the logo, the Visa brand has hardly changed in the intervening 30 years.
The new, evolved brand architecture was presented to member banks earlier this year and it is obvious that the task of moving to the new brand framework is massive. More than one billion cards and 20 million merchants will adopt the new design as part of the normal business process.
What has changed?
- The “V” in Visa has been enhanced with an original gold accent
- The banners used as borders will disappear and the word-mark will be more prominent
- Flexibility – the evolved Visa brand now works equally well on cards, computer screens, PDAs and shop windows
- the Visa dove hologram now resides on the back of the card and is integrated with the magnetic stripe, which makes the card less vulnerable to fraud and secondly increases the space for partnering companies on the front side by 65%.
The new Visa brand and identity will go live later this year when Visa member banks start to issue cards with the new format and look. Given that there are more than one billion cards in circulation, the company expects a transition period of three to five years.
More about VISA in the Brand Directory
Full interview with John Elkins
1 comment
Comments are closed.