Cumulus

Cumulus’s promo film script puts the problem plainly: “Asset management is fragmented and inefficient. Siloed teams are forced to work across different systems to get orders processed.” Its brand strategy explains why the company exists: “The software available to the industry was lacking”, and firms were “too embedded in their existing legacy systems” to move.

Cumulus’s answer is Quartz, a platform that runs trading, compliance and accounting on one system, with pre-trade compliance built in, so a fund can be stopped from trading in markets its rules prohibit. When we started working together at the end of 2021, Cumulus talked about a new kind of system that its customers never got to see. The buyers are fund managers, operations leads and compliance officers who fear uncertainty and the cost of trade mistakes, and a young company asking them to change their core system has to look as careful as they are.

We started with a Brandscape workshop and two rounds of brand sprints. The strategy put the business on one line, “asset management simplified”, and set out three buyers: a fund manager who wants a reliable tool and struggles most with compliance, an operations manager looking for a new way of doing an old process, and a compliance officer or third party administrator who needs clarity, respectability and vision.

The personality we defined is “measured, wise and calm”, modelled on an owl with 360 degree vision that never misses a thing. The voice is “to the point and detail oriented”, in simple, clean and down-to-earth language. The brand stands for unity, simplicity, precision, control and trust, and against clutter, confusion, complexity, the status quo and jargon.

In the first sprint we explored ten logo concepts in three groups, then developed four further routes in the second. The mark that came out of it is a stylised data cloud: data streamlined and filtered, with the different parts of Cumulus coming together as shades of one gradient. The Quartz product brand carries the colour.

We turned the strategy into one identity for Cumulus and its Quartz platform, set out in a brand styleguide whose first edition is dated February 2022. The system pairs the cloud mark with soft 3D capsules in blue and violet, and gives Quartz its own lockup with the line “Unifying Asset Management”.

We designed how the brand works in use: business cards, letterheads, a brochure, a three-fold leaflet, roll-up banners and a trade show stand, all led by the line “We streamline trading systems for asset managers”. For the product itself, we designed interface layouts and screens for Quartz, from navigation to chart of accounts and compliance views, in light and dark modes.

Quartz needed to be seen to be believed, so we scripted, storyboarded and produced a 3D promo film, finished in May 2022. It opens on siloed teams working across different systems, then shows Quartz delivering single-entry, straight-through processing from order management to fund accounting. Along the way it covers trade processing and settlement, corporate actions, data management, fund accounting and income, reporting through Tableau, and data kept secure on Microsoft Azure.

We built the film’s world from the brand itself. The same capsules and cloud shapes become the 3D set that the Quartz interface sits in, so the product, the identity and the film read as one.