Behind the scenes of a national financial transformation: How a Central Bank initiative became a brand with purpose, clarity, and cultural ambition.
In late 2022, I joined the team at Omnia as a freelance brand strategist to help build a strategic brand foundation for Al Etihad Payments, a newly formed subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE, and its flagship offering, Aani, the country’s instant payments platform.
This was more than a branding exercise. It was about translating national policy into brand language, aligning long-term economic goals with a coherent visual and verbal identity.
Here’s how we approached it, from initial research and stakeholder alignment to strategy creation, brand architecture and final identity development.
Research, workshops and strategic grounding
We began with immersion.
Al Etihad Payments had been formed under the National Payments Systems Strategy (NPSS) with a powerful mandate: modernise the country’s financial infrastructure, improve interoperability between banks, and make instant payments a daily reality for all residents. But the entity itself was new, there was no existing brand to build on.
Our first step was to listen. Through a series of workshops with senior stakeholders from the Central Bank, we worked to understand the internal objectives, ambitions and constraints. What emerged was a clear institutional vision:
- To support the government’s objective of becoming a cashless society
- To provide world-class payments services and infrastructure
- To ensure financial stability and inclusion across the country
The strategy wouldn’t just need to convey competence, it needed to reflect a long-term national ambition.
To inform our positioning, we conducted a detailed analysis of peer organisations responsible for national payments infrastructure in other regions, including:
- Saudi Payments (Saudi Arabia)
- NPCI (India)
- Pay.UK (United Kingdom)
Each provided lessons in how to communicate public trust, technological innovation, and national importance. We reviewed their vision statements, brand architecture, service models and external messaging.
What we found was a strong pattern: leading infrastructure brands speak with simplicity and authority. They make complex systems understandable. They position themselves not just as platforms, but as national enablers – safe, resilient, inclusive.
Framing the brand strategy and defining the architecture
With insight and input gathered, we moved into strategy development.
Positioning Al Etihad Payments
We defined the brand idea – Empowering Payments – as a unifying concept that reflected both the organisation’s mission and its public role. It spoke to banks and partners (we provide the infrastructure), but also to end users (you can rely on it).
Our brand pillars were structured around:
- Security: Confidence in a system backed by the Central Bank, compliant with international standards
- Service: A dedicated, user-first approach to helping institutions implement and maintain modern payment solutions
- Innovation: A growth mindset and future-ready infrastructure that supports a fast-evolving financial ecosystem
The brand promise – We power the payments that make the UAE prosper – grounded the narrative in both function and national pride.
Designing brand architecture for growth
With multiple products on the roadmap, we needed a brand architecture that could scale.
We recommended a sub-brand architecture that maintained strong visual and strategic links to the Al Etihad Payments master brand while allowing each product (like Aani) to express its own value proposition. This approach provides flexibility without sacrificing cohesion, a crucial balance for institutions managing both technical platforms and public-facing services.
We drew inspiration from hybrid models used by Saudi Payments and Pay.UK, where visual identity elements (like colour, tone and typography) are shared across brands, even as messaging diverges.
Solving for visibility – branding Aani
With Al Etihad Payments’ strategy in place, we turned our focus to Aani, the instant payments platform.
Aani’s ambition was unique: to become so widely used, so embedded in daily transactions, that it could become a verb. “Aani it to me,” as naturally as “Google it.”
But there was a challenge: Aani is a back-end platform. It’s offered to banks and financial institutions to integrate into their existing apps or white-label under their own brand. In both cases, visibility for Aani is low to non-existent.
To address this, we introduced two key branding strategies:
Ingredient branding
This approach positions Aani as a premium component of another product – much like “Intel Inside” signals trusted technology in a laptop. By allowing banks to include a subtle “Powered by Aani” mark within their user interface, we give Aani credit without disrupting the bank’s customer experience.
Ingredient branding works well when a technology brand enhances the perceived quality of the end-user product. It’s a way of gaining awareness through association.
Ingredient branding
Ingredient branding is a process in which a company markets an established ingredient or component used in its own products.
The overall marketing strategy seeks to signal a high-quality product based on the perception of the ingredient.
Co-branding
Co-branding allows two brands to share the spotlight. In Aani’s case, this could mean joint marketing initiatives, co-branded apps, or shared messaging between Al Etihad Payments and participating banks.
We proposed the line “Partner in Payments” to position Aani as a trusted collaborator rather than a competitor. This would help build affinity and recognition among users, while still allowing banks to lead the relationship with their customers.
These two strategies created a roadmap for building Aani’s brand equity even when the platform is technically invisible to users.
Bringing it all to life
With the brand’s strategic foundations agreed, I collaborated with Omnia’s creative director and design team to shape the final brand identities for both Al Etihad Payments and Aani.
We ensured the visual expression – typography, colour palette, tone of voice – aligned with the strategic intent:
- Authority without austerity
- Innovation without jargon
- Trustworthiness without bureaucracy
The brand toolkit delivered included not just identity guidelines, but messaging platforms, core narrative statements, and recommendations for implementation across digital and physical environments.
The Aani sub-brand retained visual links to its parent, while adopting a more user-focused, dynamic tone. Its tagline – Empowering Instant Payments – captured the core value in a single phrase.
Final thought
This project offered a rare opportunity: to help define a national brand at the moment of its creation.
Al Etihad Payments now has a brand identity built not just to serve institutions, but to support a nation’s shift towards digital finance. The strategy is scalable, credible, and aligned with long-term public value.
And for Aani, the foundations are set. It may not be visible on every screen, but if the strategy holds, the brand will grow through every transaction, until “Aani it to me” becomes second nature.
If you want stronger strategy behind your pitches or client work, I provide senior brand support for agencies during busy periods or high-stakes opportunities. Clear positioning, solid narrative and practical collaboration that helps your team deliver its best work.