center

How do you dynamically evolve and elevate a Fintech brand in a rapidly transforming industry — and build the foundation for a category-defining exit? 

In fintech, brand is not decoration. It is infrastructure. The clarity of a company's identity — what it stands for, how it communicates, how it presents itself across every touchpoint — determines how fast it can grow, how much trust it can earn, and ultimately, how valuable it becomes. Center understood this from the start. 

We are thrilled to have worked again with Sam Bergin and Jenna Walcott at Center — a company built to simplify employee expense tracking and surface the most actionable insights for finance leaders. The essence of the Center brand is intelligence. Finance leaders must be able to see connections in spending data so they can make better decisions. 

Our role was to build a brand universe that integrates and delivers that intelligence throughout — from the product experience to the market position to the visual identity itself. CHALLENGE Fintech moves fast. The competitive landscape shifts constantly, new capabilities emerge, and the companies that lead the category are the ones that can evolve without losing coherence. Center had the product, the team, and the market insight to lead. What it needed was a brand architecture sophisticated enough to keep pace with the innovation — and credible enough to carry the company into its next stage of growth. 

A new brand strategy is a forcing function. It demands that the identity catch up to the vision — and it requires a system flexible enough to accommodate product extensions, platform expansions, and evolving market needs without requiring a brand overhaul every time the company grows. 

APPROACH 

In partnership with Carla Adams at Duality Strategies, we developed a new brand strategy and a custom brand identity system built for a company that never stops moving. The system is modular by design — composed of building blocks that can be combined in different ways to adapt to different needs, platforms, scales, complexities, and product line extensions. It maintains the integrity of the brand while making it easy for internal teams to use without constant creative oversight. 

Intelligence as the Brand Organizing Principle We positioned intelligence — the ability to see connections in data that others miss — as the foundation of everything Center does and everything the brand communicates. This is not a generic fintech positioning. It reflects Center's specific and genuine advantage: a card-first expense platform that gives finance teams real-time visibility into all employee spending, connecting the moment of purchase to the insight that follows. 

The brand strategy gave the team language and a framework to communicate that advantage clearly, consistently, and compellingly across every audience. A Modular Identity System Built to Scale The visual identity system we developed reflects Center's approach to the product itself: structured, intelligent, and flexible. Modular elements can be combined and reconfigured as the company introduces new products and expands its platform — so the brand grows with the business rather than constraining it. Sam and Jenna know intimately that brand either accelerates growth or gets in its way. 

We designed a system that does the former, because they never stop rolling out the next innovation. 

RESULTS 

• Acquired by American Express in April 2025 — one of the most storied names in commercial payments — to modernize expense management for small and medium-sized businesses

• More than one hundred forty million dollars raised from private investors since founding

• A brand identity system flexible enough to hold Center's full product suite — corporate card, expense management, travel, and automated accounting — as a single, coherent platform

• Center's software, combined with American Express's commercial and small business cards, creates a seamless expense management platform delivering value across the full commercial card payments process

This is what it looks like when brand strategy does its job. Center's acquisition by American Express is proof that intelligence, clearly communicated and consistently expressed, builds companies that the world's most trusted institutions want to be part of. We are proud to have played a role in that story.