PayTech startup PlanPay launched globally on the proposition 'Worth the Wait'

Launch PlanPay into the competitive fintech market with a global brand strategy, purpose and proposition, and support its ambition to become a global leader starting from the travel sector.

whiteGREY's remit covered brand strategy and design — logo, guidelines and tools — plus masterbrand guidelines, tone of voice, brand architecture and a full template set including typography and colour palette, launched into market immediately with the rollout continuing over coming months.

PlanPay entered the fintech market with a complete brand system focused on the travel sector, 'unlocking a world of travel experiences by connecting people with places and spaces via a payment platform that offers freedom from the debt trap'. No commercial results were published with the launch.

In March 2023 PayTech brand PlanPay unveiled its launch brand strategy — a new purpose and proposition backed by a complete visual identity — via creative technology agency whiteGREY. It was the first work to market since whiteGREY was appointed creative and media agency of record after a competitive pitch in October 2022.

The brand's centre of gravity is the proposition 'Worth the Wait'. "While PlanPay is fundamentally a payments platform, they're really in the business of promoting financial freedom for all, and that vision became the centre of the brand proposition," said Nomfundo Msomi, whiteGREY's head of brand strategy, describing a process that defined the brand's purpose before building the full platform and architecture. The stated vision: creating freedom from 'financial hangovers'.

ECD Joe Hill described a system that "balances the pragmatic and the emotional — bringing order to planning, calm to paying, and framing the joy of what has been paid for", with a mark that juxtaposes hard and soft geometry to distil the cadence of using PlanPay, unpacking into a dynamic language of shapes. PlanPay entered the market focused on the travel sector, positioning itself against the debt trap of credit-based travel spending, with CMO Emma Smith crediting whiteGREY's scalable creative thinking for allowing the team to move at pace toward global growth ambitions.

The proposition reframes the product's core behaviour — waiting and saving — as the benefit rather than the friction.

Launching into travel first gives a generic payments architecture a concrete, emotionally loaded use case.

The full system (architecture, tone of voice, templates) was built before market entry, signalling global ambitions rather than a logo swap.

The hard-and-soft geometry gives the brand a ownable visual device in a category of interchangeable fintech marks.

A payments brand can own the emotion on the far side of the transaction: sell the joy of what has been paid for, and the waiting becomes the product.

The new brand identity and architecture launched into market immediately from March 2023, translating across all elements as the rollout continued in the coming months.