As most startups do, Mintos has its own story about the challenging times from the beginning of the company’s launch. A few people doing more than a few jobs; running operations, developing a product, building strategy, positioning the company, hunting for loan originators, providing a satisfying service to every individual customer. The Mintos brand was born from these first steps: a five-people team establishing the niche business of an online marketplace for investments in loans.
Five years and EUR 3.5 billion of financed loans later, Mintos grew from a niche startup to a leader of the European market of investments in loans. Mintos is a brand that is a go-to place for 194 000 international investors looking for investment opportunities brought to the Mintos marketplace by 69 loan originators from more than 30 countries of the world. The five-people team has transformed into a 150 people team working from hubs in Riga, Berlin, Vilnius and Warsaw.
From a fintech platform to international investors go-to marketplace
In the beginning, as we have been investing most of our resources into the development of the marketplace platform, the technology aspect of our business took over and the brief for the designer of the Mintos logo fully reflected that. The team knew that eventually, there would come a time when the Mintos product would evolve and the need for a brand upgrade would arise.
The resulting product of the first Mintos logo brief was a simple and sharp typeface logo, where the symbolic representation of Mintos was placed on the letter “i”, with turquoise dots below and above the letter, and the letter ‘i’ itself being the connection between two peers. This symbol was a clear representation of what Mintos does: a point of connection between those looking for opportunities to save and invest and those looking to borrow.
Redesign – a five year rule
Some branding sources say that it is a rule of thumb to re-do the logo after a period of five years. Some case studies show that it is better not to touch a good logo too much.
For us at Mintos, the case was a bit different. The company has reached a point where the result of our five years of work calls for the brand to evolve, too.
The Mintos business has been built on an innovative finance technology platform for online investments in loans. While we are continually investing significant resources into the constant product development and innovation, there are new requests for our brand to envelop. With Mintos’ growth, our market role has changed and evolved, our responsibility has grown bigger. We are going into the future with new plans that will further enhance Mintos investors’ experience, further extend our products and services and keep us on the track of our mission of opening the market to a new asset class – loans.
In respect to this, a more contemporary look and a logo upgrade had to be made to be an accompanying visual support for our evolving brand and the company’s future efforts.
New Mintos logo – solid, stronger, simplified
We are happy to present you with the new Mintos logo.
Developed in-house by Mintos designer Krisjanis Rozentals, our new revamped logo reflects our brand’s persona.
The changes taken are aligned with our tone of voice, our values for all our stakeholders and future vision of where we want to be and how we want to be perceived.
The logo is reshaped in order to reflect our solidness and approachability.
It is recoloured to reflect our professionalism.
It is simplified to reflect our lean approach to business.
The change has been introduced to the weight of the Mintos logo, with wider characters appearing more firm and supporting. Roundness adds to the approachability of the logo, while reduction of additional symbols and colours helps to declutter the logo, making it more minimalist and UX friendly.
The minimalist approach is not introduced for the sake of being trendy – this characteristic helps the logo to be better optimised for different displays, making it more adjustable and enhancing the visibility in different sizes. This logo optimisation comes in handy especially for the Mintos product team that is working on various projects where brand display plays a big role.
Aleksandrs Bickovs, UX Lead at Mintos said that during the process of rethinking the new Mintos identity, the main guiding idea was to make it simple, accessible, modern, flexible and globally recognisable.
Marcis Gogis, Head of Product at Mintos says that the change of the Mintos logo is a part of the company’s evolution. “It is a logical step for growing companies, entering a new life cycle. Our goal is to make services better with the help of technology, which means simplification – and that is what we have done with our logo as well. By simplifying it, we have made it much stronger.”
Coming up next
The change of logo is only the beginning of the Mintos brand refresh process. We have already upgraded the Mintos website’s main page, freeing the backgrounds and updating the font system. On the frontpages we are using visuals with real people, making our approach more human and customer-oriented.
Designers are in the process of setting up a new colour palette and finalising choices for the font system. We love some of the symbolic gimmicks our designers have introduced to brand guidelines that are a work in process.
Soon, we will upgrade the main menu content and present the Mintos video that will additionally help with explaining what is Mintos and what is it that we do. The remake of the Mintos blog is also in the queue for the upcoming period. This will enable us to deliver even more quality and diverse content to investors and the general audience.
