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ADENZA CASE STUDY
SUMMARY
Sector:
Fintech
Brand type: Merger (Axiom and Calypso), optionally an umbrella brand
Primary Client: Axiom and Calypso Senior Partner Client: Superunion
Trademark territories: 50
Trademark classes: 4
Countries: Global
Languages: 57
Validation types: Localised Language, International Language, Trademark Identical, Trademark Extended, Google, URL
Further legal work: Dot com purchase negotiation
International Standards Implemented:
ISO 9001 Quality management and process implementation (Appella Ltd)
ISO 639-2 Language codification
BACKGROUND
Towards the end of June 2021, James Saunders of Superunion called us with the challenge to help create a name for the merger of leading fintech companies Axiom and Calypso which required global validation in 50 trademark jurisdictions and 57 languages by the beginning of August.
The new company brand name would spearhead the newco offer of complete cross-asset, front-to-back, integrated platforms delivering end-to-end trading, treasury, risk management and regulatory compliance solutions to banks, investment managers, treasuries and financial market infrastructure providers.
The aim of creating a new name was to ensure inclusivity and give employees of both businesses the opportunity to move forward together in a new direction. Rather than one brand cannibalising the other, which might lead to some employees feeling excluded, Calypso and Axiom SL would continue to be used indefinitely, not just as a transitionary measure.
The umbrella brand would need to accommodate future acquisitions (with their own product names), not just Calypso and Axiom SL.
PROJECT
The name required a clear, unsuffixed dot com and a clear road to registrability in the trademark landscape.
The key brand criteria of energy, passion and commitment, combined with a fintech anchor or reference, provided us with a good opportunity to key into a number of relevant fields in Interlect, our global lexicon, such as music, dance and mathematical operations, fields which typically contain many globally recognised words.
Adenza is a combination of the words add and cadenza. Add is recognisable in a raft of northern European languages and cadenza is by the same analysis global. Add embodies the mathematical and analytical skills strongly associated with both Calypso and AxiomSL, while cadenza signifies the passion to innovate, build market-leading products and consistently deliver value to customers.
We provided many other options to the add + cadenza combination and this process of reviewing and honing down the many thousands of names that Appella and Superunion worked on took several days. Once the pre-longlist had been created, we then checked this against existing dot COMs and the legal implications thereof.
Validation of the remaining names against our negative word database in 118 languages - followed by graded, tabulated, localised linguistic checks in 57 languages and identical trademark checks in 50 jurisdictions - was the challenge we accepted. It took just a few days.
As soon as a shortlist of acceptable names had been prepared and Google checked, ahead of our usual process, Superunion presented the list to our Axiom and Calypso clients for assessment. At this point, and within a few more days, the preferred option of Adenza was identified along with two further names as backups (in case the Extended Validation trademark and Google checks on over 400 variant forms of Adenza elicited problematic prior rights within the designated trademark classes).
In parallel, with the client's looming deadline to announce the new name, we acted as intermediary to secure the all important .com from a GoDaddy vendor.
Thanks to some finessing of time constraints, James and our friends at Axiom and Calypso bought us an extra two weeks by which to steer the new name successfully through these final phases.
Adenza was launched on the first of September.
