Giving an Octopus Energy fintech real personality

Results

A finance brand that looked safe, not confident

Octopus Money is the financial services arm of Octopus, the group behind Octopus Energy and Octopus Investments. The business is a smaller, fast-growing part of the group, and the project arrived as a referral from Rascal Ventures, though the working relationship ran directly between Salo and the Octopus Money team throughout. Their website was showing its age: small, clunky to use, and carrying a brand that had settled into safe and flat.

The real problem was harder than a visual refresh. Financial services websites all look the same, blue and corporate and cautious, and Octopus Money wanted to sit apart from the traditional banks without losing the credibility that makes someone comfortable handing over their money. The site had to let the Octopus personality through and make a dry sector feel more human, in the same spirit Octopus Energy brought to its own market.

One more thing shaped the brief. Octopus Money had designers of their own, so whatever we created had to work for the team who would live with it long after the project ended.

Creative freedom inside strict brand guardrails

We came in as UI and UX design partners, and the work started in a room together. The team visited Octopus Money's London HQ and ran a discovery session in FigJam, gathering visual references and mapping which parts of the brand could move and which could not. Running it in person meant opinions got captured on the spot rather than chased down later.

The central challenge was the guardrails. Octopus brand guidelines fix the core elements, so colour and typography were settled before the project began. All the creative room was in the application: how those fixed elements were arranged, paced and brought to life on a page. We broke the site into its key templates, including a homepage, a service page and a contact page, and produced several distinct concepts so the client could see genuinely different ways the brand could be applied. Their feedback narrowed those into one route.

From there the work moved into high-fidelity Figma visuals and a clickable prototype, so stakeholders across the business could see the designs in context and understand how the site would behave. A design system came together alongside them, which held everything consistent and kept the work inside the guidelines. The turnaround was fast, so feedback loops stayed tight, with deliberate calls about when to bring the wider internal team in.

A design system Octopus Money's own team still builds on

Octopus Money got what it asked for: a financial services website that carries the personality of the brand and still reads as a business you would trust with your money, rather than another blue corporate site.

The clearest proof came after the project ended. Octopus Money's internal designers picked up the design system and components and used them to build further pages, extending the site in the same style. They found the system straightforward to work with, which is the whole point of a design system, and an in-house team choosing to build on external work rather than around it is a meaningful verdict on the work. More than 18 months on, the design is still in place and still doing its job.

Joe McQuillan of Octopus Money put the working relationship this way in a Google review: "It's been a real pleasure working with Josh, Carl, and Sarah on the redesign of our Octopus Money website. From day one, the team understood our brief, approached the visual exploration with tonnes of creativity, and delivered exceptional final designs. Personable, collaborative, and talented - we've loved working with Salo and look forward to working with them again in the future!"

It's been a real pleasure working with Josh, Carl, and Sarah on the redesign of our Octopus Money website. From day one, the team understood our brief, approached the visual exploration with tonnes of creativity, and delivered exceptional final designs. Personable, collaborative, and talented - we've loved working with Salo and look forward to working with them again in the future!