Tyme Bank launches digital service for the Philippine’s 51.2 million unbanked citizens

GoTyme Bank “human first, bank second” branding aims to connect with Filipino culture.

By Abbey Bamford

October 26, 2022
2:29 pm

October 26, 2022
3:32 pm

DixonBaxi has collaborated with Tyme Bank to create GoTyme Bank, a new digital service that hopes to “disrupt the Filipino market”.

The 2019 Financial Inclusion Survey revealed that 70% of Filipinos (51.2 million people) are unbanked or underserved by existing financial services. GoTyme Bank needed “warm and tactile” branding to help make banking more accessible for them, according to DixonBaxi’s senior designer Tassia Swulinska.

She adds that a key focus of the initial brief was to “challenge the norms of a saturated and old-fashioned market” and break down financial barriers. To help them understand what was required, Swulinska says that DixonBaxi spent time with the Tyme Bank team “to understand what connects with the Filipino culture”.

Swulinska says that the design team felt it was important “not to impose an impression of what [they] believed” to be Filipino culture. Research helped inform the suite of pictograms for savings pots which are designed to be “relevant and relatable to the culture”, according to Swulinka.

DixonBaxi’s “human first, bank second approach” to the project is designed to help “facilitate an open, transparent and honest financial perspective”, says DixonBaxi’s head of experience design Ben Wynn-Owen.

He adds that the studio opted to use recognisable shapes associated with debit cards and coins to “draw people in”. Playing with these shapes, DixonBaxi used various levels of transparency and layering to “suggest accumulation and momentum”, explains Wynn-Owen.

GoTyme’s branding attempts to convey financial optimism by using “colour in combination,” according to Swulinska. She explains that, through blending a suite of bright colours in motion to “create transparencies and light”, the studio was not only trying to instil positivity, but also make the brand stand out in a crowded market.

The main typeface tries to “break away from the banking norms” as the “well-crafted, chunky serif” differs from the sans serif normally used for fintech and banking, accpridng to Swulinska. “We selected Larken by Ellen Luff Type Foundry, feeling its confidence contrasted nicely with the softness and expression in the rest of GoTyme”, she says. The “subtle cuts” of secondary body font, Rund, aims to relate back to the coins and card shapes used across the branding.

DixonBaxi also designed the GoTyme app, which is an interactive system that aims to “educate users with intuitive product journeys and motion behaviours”, created to celebrate all types of financial victories, says Wynn-Owen. Swulinska adds that the in-app personalisation is meant to give customers more control, so DixonBaxi “integrated customisation into everything from savings pots” to card customisation.

GoTyme Bank’s new branding will roll out first across awareness campaigns and then in pop-up kiosks in stores across the Philippines. The pop-ups will provide customers with instant access to their new bank account and on the spot card printing. “This connects you to the app which is where customers can start to interact with the product and begin their journey,” says Swulinska.