Five nines

Few will have heard of SWIFT, but nearly all of us use or benefit from them every day. Created by and for the financial industry in 1973, they provide the technology platform and the products and services to allow 9,700 organisations in the global financial world to exchange information securely. Their systems are incredibly reliable – the organisation talk proudly of “five nines” – 99.999%.

Perception lagging

The problem? We live in a very different world now. There are more and more financial organisations and companies, from more and more countries, with more ways of doing things: it’s vast, complex, interconnected. In the midst of a global financial crisis, SWIFT is an independent entity sitting in the middle of a maelstrom, with a role to play in shaping market practices and providing strong and potentially strategic support – someone to rely on at the highest level not just to provide reliability and efficiency but to help drive progress and find new ways of doing things. SWIFT has been making a major contribution in helping the financial world to achieve extraordinary things – but its contribution to markets, institutions and companies had not been properly recognised. Time to put things right.

Agenda setters

Dragon Rouge looked to shift the emphasis of communications from passive to active, from the technical process nature of the services to the simplicity of the benefits and to the influence SWIFT has on the capability of its customers and partners. In practice this has meant changing the tone and style to become clearer and much more confident. And visually its meant using a combination of both illustration and photography for the first time in SWIFT’s history: completely new dimensions to reflect a more diverse organisation that also bring personality, expressing emotional benefits, and communicating proactivity. It’s meant careful evolution of the marque, so as to protect their strong heritage. And it’s meant colour, most emphatically in the striped ‘messaging and links’ visual interpretation of their work interconnecting cultures, countries, and clients seamlessly. The perception of SWIFT has radically altered and SWIFT’s role in the financial world is well recognised – innovating new ways of working, enhancing efficiency, lowering costs and reducing risk. Bringing much needed confidence to an industry under pressure.