Fintech logos: Chase, PayPal, Wise, bKash and a worked contrast check

Chase, 1960: an abstract mark for a bank

For Chase Manhattan Bank, the designers Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar produced a stylised octagon in 1960, rolled out on 22 November. According to Chase, the sides of the octagon represent forward motion and the empty centre suggests that progress starts from the middle; the mark is a single unit made of separate parts, like the bank.^[1]

That explanation is the bank’s own. We have not found a source that measures what customers read into the shape.

PayPal, 2014 and 2024: a monogram for small screens

In April 2014 PayPal introduced an identity by fuseproject, the studio founded by Yves Béhar. It had four parts: a stronger wordmark in a modified Futura, a monogram of two overlapping, translucent Ps, brighter colours and an angled graphic.^[2] Béhar explained the brief this way:

“It felt that the current brand had been created for an online world and a lot of it is moving to mobile. It’s time for things to be more compact and most importantly for the icon to become the leading element that is seen online.”

Yves Béhar, 2014^[2]

According to Dezeen, the overlapping Ps were meant to represent the physical act of peer-to-peer transactions.^[2] PayPal replaced that logo on 17 September 2024; its 2024 monogram, designed by Pentagram, is a modified version of the 2014 one.^[3]

Wise, 2021: a new name

TransferWise renamed itself Wise on 22 February 2021.^[4] The company said the new name “catches up with who we’re already building for – a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives”.^[5] The archive’s Wise record lists the logo files it holds and where they came from.

bKash, 2011: mobile money in Bangladesh

bKash launched on 21 July 2011 with three services: cash in, cash out and send money. It started as a joint venture between BRAC Bank and Money in Motion.^[6] Its logo pairs a magenta symbol with the bKash wordmark; see the bKash record for the files in the archive and their sources.

বিকাশ ২০১১ সালের ২১ জুলাই যাত্রা শুরু করে। এর লোগো ও ফাইলের উৎস দেখতে আর্কাইভের বিকাশ পাতাটি দেখুন।

A worked contrast check

WCAG 2 measures contrast as a ratio between the relative luminance of two colours, from 1:1 to 21:1. Normal text needs at least 4.5:1 and large text at least 3:1. Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no contrast requirement,^[7] so a logo is not “failing” when its colour is light. The ratios matter when the same colour is used for text, links or buttons in an app.

The table below uses six saturated colours of the kind common in financial apps, measured against white and against #121212, a typical dark-mode surface. The values are examples for the method, not any company’s official palette. The ratios are calculated when the page is built.^[8]

No row passes on both backgrounds, and none can. To reach 4.5:1 on white, a colour’s relative luminance must be at most 0.183. To reach 4.5:1 on #121212, it must be at least 0.202. Those ranges do not overlap, so no single colour meets both.^[8]

In practice this means planning a lighter tint of the brand colour for dark surfaces and a darker one for light surfaces, and keeping the logo itself in its approved colours. You can test your own pairs with the contrast checker.

Checking a mark at small sizes

App icons and notifications show a logo far smaller than a web page does. Before you rely on a file at those sizes:

• Export the mark at the sizes you will actually use and look at each one on both light and dark backgrounds. The favicon generator makes these exports in your browser.
• Check that a vector file really contains vector paths and no hidden dependencies with the SVG inspector.
• Use the brand owner’s own small-size or app-icon artwork when it exists, rather than shrinking the full logo.

Looking for similar marks

The archive can rank logos that look visually similar to a given one. That ranking is a visual comparison, not a legal opinion, and it cannot tell you whether a mark is available or infringes another. For that, search the official registers, such as the WIPO Global Brand Database, the USPTO trademark search or, for Bangladesh, the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT), and take advice from a qualified professional.