Meet the new Fat Zebra

New brand, same promise.

Hello, we’re Fat Zebra!

In March 2020, Fat Zebra turned eight. We had planned this as a time to celebrate our journey and the progress our business has made over the years by launching a new brand identity. However, in the wake of COVID-19, these plans for celebrations soon turned to pouring our energy into finding the best ways we could meaningfully add value for our partners and customers in these uncertain times.

It's given us a great opportunity to reflect and look ahead to the future, with an unwavering focus on supporting our customers through to the other side of these health and economic crises. While unprecedented challenges remain and will continue, we're so proud of the work our team has put into our new website and brand identity, and are excited to share it.

Brand evolution

Fat Zebra was started in Canberra back in 2012, with co-founders Matt Lewis and Pred Dragila tinkering away in Matt’s parents’ garage on a mission to build and deliver a technology stack that put the control for optionality back in the merchants hands, and make global online payments simple. Fast forward to today; we have over 22,000 happy merchants and enable local processing in almost 40 countries, have partner acquiring available in over 100 countries, with over 20 currencies to choose for settlement. We’re entering new verticals, doubling down on our technology and releasing new products to unlock even more value for our partners.

To celebrate how far Fat Zebra has come, and how dedicated we remain to accelerating the ambitions of all our partners, we’ve released our new brand identity which is focussed on the message ‘Uncomplicated Commerce’.

Our Co-founder and CEO Pred Dragila said the new brand has been a collaborative, team effort that represents a new era for Fat Zebra.

"Even in these uncertain times; the internet economy continues to get bigger and broader, with new challenges every day requiring fresh thinking and new solutions. Fat Zebra’s value has always been that we bring our partners together in one ecosystem, putting everything merchants need to do more business in one platform.” - Pred Dragila

Our new brand reflects that simplicity. As we continue to create new products and solutions for our partners - we need a brand that is progressive and reflects our innovation, energy, and approachability. As part of the brand relaunch, Fat Zebra reassessed three core parts of our business: strategy, internal operating structure, and how we communicate.

Strategy

When reviewing our strategy, we put under the microscope the changing context around us, as well as our depth of experience in payments to map out how we can have the most impact over the coming years.

"We firmly believe in continually expanding our payment ecosystem, giving as many people as possible the knowledge, tools and support they need to navigate the challenges payments can bring and to make informed decisions, which is more important than ever." - Pred Dragila.

Our product roadmap will support this as we continue rolling out products and enhancements which will help our customers reduce costs and grow.

Operations

We worked with everyone in the business to workshop how Fat Zebra operates, so we can ensure the (suddenly remote) team was aligned with the refinement and direction of our strategy. One of the decisions that came out of this was the change in removing the name ‘Cloud Payments’ from our portfolio. This change is a significant one. Cloud Payments has been operating as a sub-brand of Fat Zebra since 2017. Consolidating to the one Fat Zebra brand is a more accurate reflection of our focus and internal setup.

Communications

We want to focus on how we communicate internally and externally, about the work we do and the impact we’ve made for our customers, to help us have a clearer understanding of not only what we do, but why we’re doing it, and how this can benefit our our partners and the broader payments industry.

The new brand

To kick things off, we thought about the visual identity of who we are. The first logo was commissioned back in 2012. Since then, our business has evolved hugely so it felt time for a change. We worked on developing a concept about ‘building a payments ecosystem for our customers to thrive’. Our brand strategy framework builds up from the Fat Zebra brand foundations to achieve the company and brand vision. The logo we landed on was from a hand drawn custom mark that alludes to the three core layers of our ecosystem – payments, billing and acquiring.

We paired the logo with a tagline 'Uncomplicated Commerce', decided on our primary and secondary colour palettes, and our typeface ‘Mont’. The new website was to build from scratch, pulling together all key elements from the independent websites for Cloud Payments and Fat Zebra. While the launch of the website is a huge milestone, it will continue to evolve. Watch this space for announcements, new features and enhancements to come.

What hasn’t changed? Our drive and passion for the work we do; making it easy to accept payments online and enter new markets all over the world.