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FINASTRA CASE STUDY
SUMMARY
Sector:
Financial
Brand type: Corporate
Primary Client: Misys, D + H
Senior Partner Client: Brand Union (now SuperUnion)
Trademark territories: 44 jurisdictions
Trademark classes: 4
Countries: 46
Languages: 50
Validation types: Localized Language, International Language, Trademark Identical, Trademark Extended, Google, URL
International Standards Implemented: ISO 9001 Quality management and process implementation (Appella Ltd), ISO 639-2 Language codification
BACKGROUND
Financial services companies Misys and D + H were looking for a name for their newly merged company.
Part of the Vista Equity Partners group, Misys already had a huge global footprint. Its solutions and financial software was used by 48 of the 50 world’s largest banks and 12 of the top 20 asset managers.
D+H, a global payments and lending technology provider, was serving nearly 8,000 financial institutions, specialty lenders, community banks, credit unions, governments and corporations.
The newly merged company would be the third largest fintech globally.
SuperUnion (then Brand Union) is one of the world’s top branding agencies working for iconic brands such as Microsoft, Heineken, GSK, Land Rover and Deloitte.
PROJECT
This project was interesting and ultimately enjoyable because the time constraints necessitated a dual approach to naming and branding. In other words the proposition, positioning and ‘look and feel’ were worked on by Brand Union to support our naming process in parallel.
Initially, our client-specific process was based on guideline information only. A revised proposition meant we had to substitute some of our selected names for newly generated ones. We then put this revised longlist through the initial validation checks of identical trademarks and localized linguistics.
Our annotated longlist generated a shortlist of 25 names to put through Google and URL checks but, by the time we presented a top 10, events had overtaken us again.
A newly tweaked brief meant that we were having to focus on a different proposition requiring different names. We expected this so no problem and the revised set generated a further shortlist. Fifteen new names were sent round 50 linguists and, in 48 hours, graded and annotated for client appraisal comprising full validation bullets, contextual presentation, linguist grades plus a word check in Interlect, our international lexicon. We were then tasked with putting three names into Extended Validation, a fuller breakdown of each selected name by phonetic and visual similarity for further trademark and Google checks.
These checks raised sufficient concerns to start another round of Extended Validation on a client-created name which also fell short at this last hurdle.
With this ongoing, we carried out a final naming round in which Finastra was created and successfully defended at the initial and extended validation phase.
The name Finastra is a blend of financial and astra ‘star’ and has the broad meaning of ‘an omniscient eye in the financial universe.’
