Following its recent rebrand, UK fintech startup Lumio secured £1.15m in a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. To get an insight into the company’s latest strategic moves, we spoke to Charlie Richardson, co-founder and CEO at Lumio.
“In the past couple of months, we've seen incredible growth in new customers, brought on board some really talented team members that are already having a substantial impact, and we just closed our £1.15m Seed round. They are all major steps forward on our mission to help 1 million customers grow their money by 2024. An ideal time to freshen up our branding and pinpoint this period of fast growth.”
The UK-based personal financing app, Lumio, has raised £1.15m in a target-smashing crowdfunding campaign. With an initial target of £250,000, the campaign has attracted more than 1,280 crowd investors and some of the UK’s most successful angel investors including Matteo Berlucchi, William Frewen, Richard Fearn and Ben Lundie. The funds will be used to fuel Lumio’s expansion internationally and achieve its mission of “growing 1 million customers’ money by 2024”.
“After a turbulent 12 months, it’s an incredible start to 2021 by smashing our fundraising target and most exciting of all, welcoming over twelve-hundred new crowdfunding investors to join some of the UK’s most successful angel investors, as Lumio investors. The funds will be used to achieve product-market fit, accelerate the product intelligence and personalisation and scale Lumio internationally.”
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Lumio is a personal finance manager that describes itself as “the personal finance brain that grows your money on autopilot”. Founded by Charlie Richardson, Adrian Shedden and Tom Richardson in 2017, the company differentiates from competitors like Emma, Yolt, and Money Dashboard with its unique automated financing engine that lets customers connect their entire financial lives whilst matching them with the right product at the right time, and sets up automatic transfers to grow their money on autopilot.
As the company enters its next growth stage, Charlie and his team have decided to focus on the broader impact of Lumio that goes beyond its product and covers the company’s overall brand purpose and vision.
“As we were entering a new stage of growth, we decided that it was time to focus not only on the functionality and performance of our app and service, but something much bigger, our company culture, team, and brand.”
The ‘new’ Lumio
One of the major changes in Lumio’s ‘new’ brand look is its logo. The company has transformed its original soft, round-ish lettermark logo into a sharper, more angular and distinguishing style. The new edgy design is chosen to better reflect the company’s values, maturity and purpose – "to give your finances a brain".
“Some of the core values at the centre of Lumio are to embrace being Open, Accessible, and Flexible, so we set about designing a logo that embodied just that. Our logo is made up of shapes and angles that come together to form the characters of our name - the same way Lumio brings your finances (of all shapes and sizes) into one clever app. Because our finances are as unique as we are humans, we wanted our logo to represent the coming together of all these unique formations."
To bring more personality to its brand, Lumio has also introduced a new palette of warm, friendly and balanced colours and a fresh illustration style.
“A contemporary abstract representation of people is the best way to share the importance of still being human behind all the smart technology that we have worked on.”
But Lumio’s personality is not only limited to its logo and website. Unique, personal touches can now be spotted throughout Lumio’s app too.
“Within the app there are points at which we can flow through some of our personality. These characters are almost guides of the Lumio app who help draw your attention to changes you can make to achieve your financial goals.”
How has Lumio managed to navigate through the COVID crisis and rebuild its brand?
Like many other fintech startups, Lumio has experienced some major challenges through the pandemic like funding lapses and cost-cutting. But these only made it refocus on the core of its business – its people (both internal and external).
“Just like any other business, we've had our ups, downs and unknowns through the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, we were due to close what could have been a significant round of investments. Three notable investors pulled out on Friday the 13th due to liquidity issues. But we pulled ourselves up and decided to focus on what was truly important, our people - both the team and our customers.”
Its people-first approach allowed the company to rebuild its brand. By cutting costs, adopting a content-driven organic approach to grow its community, and redefining its brand, Lumio is coming out of the crisis with a clear purpose, mission, vision, and value proposition.
“This re-evaluation of our core values helped us build a stronger brand, as well as team. Looking back, it set the foundations for our rebranding and the type of company we are quickly becoming and strive to be.”
What's next for Lumio?
According to Charlie, Lumio’s recent brand makeover is just the beginning of the company’s scaling journey. Following its fresh seed funding, Lumio is planning to completely revamp its app and website in the coming months, and focus on supporting its growing community in the best possible way through building the ultimate personal finance product.
“With customer acquisition growing sharply and community engagement ramping up, we have an incredible opportunity to scale the product and our service. From a branding perspective, over the next few months we'll be revamping our app and website - to ensure we reflect a human and aspirational character that is embedded at the heart of Lumio. We've been overwhelmed with the response we got so far from our community and we are eager to share the new and improved Lumio with everyone.
I've mentioned our crowdfunding. Having now closed this seed round early, it gives us the time to invest back into our community. We now have access to the brains and insights of an incredible community that can help Lumio build an exceptional product for them. We have a suite of new game-changing features coming out very soon and we're looking forward to the impact they have on the world of personal finance.”