Worry-free money
Positioning
Messaging
Voice
Writing guidelines
Naming
Product UX writing
Website
Brand campaigns
CRM campaigns
Social campaigns
Video
Systems
Editorial
Leading words and brand systems for a challenger payments app
Zing was HSBC's big bet to take market share from Wise and Revolut for foreign exchange services.
A separate brand, proposition and entity from HSBC, the Zing app launched in the UK to offer transfers, travel money and rewards to its users.
Before launch, I was hired to shape the brand and land messaging across the product and comms.
My role expanded to lead a writing team, while evolving brand and processes to support growth.
Despite winning awards in UX and customer service, surpassing set growth targets and a team of 400+ people, bigger moves at HSBC put Zing on the chopping block. Zing shut down in Summer 2025.
125K+
customers in 15 months
4.8 & 4.7
stars in App Store & Google Play
Best App
Onboarding
UX award
by 11:FS
fastest onboarding
in the industry
3m 30s
Positioning
We had a business case, target audience, commercial insights and other high-level, propositional pieces defined to support the brand direction. But we lacked a repeatable, cut-through idea to indicate what gives Zing competitive advantage for use in everyday communications.
Working with Zing's Marketing Director, we landed on positioning Zing as Worry-free money – a relaxed, reassuring payments choice for managing currencies and keeping customers happily focused on doing their own thing
(or the tagline, Do your Zing).
Messaging
The positioning idea of
worry-free money was expressed with a mix of high level emotive and lower level functional messages to attract customers, signal benefits, urge downloads and sustain active use of the app.
I developed a suite of foundational messages to define the most important things we wanted to say about Zing that customers would care about. These became core for avenues like App Store screens, starter packs for influencers and general guidance to express Zing accurately and consistently.
Voice
I owned the brand voice guidelines, built on three principles to write:
Sharp, Inspiring and Confident.
Besides these principles, the voice guidelines included real-world examples, befores and afters for copy practice and advice on how to land copy and protect our brand, such as how to play with the Zing name (sparingly!).
The guidelines were used to train customer service teams and shared with creative partners to help them develop comms for the Zing brand accurately.
The guidelines were updated often and presented internally to help teams stay consistent with any outbound communications.
Writing guidelines
Besides advising for brand comms, I developed technical writing guidelines to support other areas of Zing's operations.
I developed house style guidelines to lock down formatting, spelling, preferred word choices and other itty-bitty things to minimize errors, lessen bankspeak and improve writing consistency across internal departments and external agencies.
I also supported emergency comms teams with templates to write and send consistent, on-brand messages in the event of app outages and staff absence.
Naming
Brands that create new things have to name those things carefully.
I named a few things at Zing that balance creativity and brand recognition with clear understanding:
Surprizing Rewards, our monthly prize draw campaign for customers to win luxury holidays in exchange for social media actions. One of the few things chosen to pun on the Zing name.
Lightning-fast payments as a friendlier, on-brand way to express the swathe of instant, real-time international payment options per country.
All Things Zing, our newsletter that rounded up active promotions, new feature announcements and business news.
Product UX Writing
At Zing I was heavily involved in content design and UX writing on the app, collaborating with product designers and CRM teams to shape user journeys and enhance the customer experience, refining copy to be sharp, precise and useful.
Among many other projects, my biggest achievement was working with the onboarding team to refine the journey to become the fastest in the industry at 3m 30secs, earning Zing a UX award from 11:FS.
Tap the button for a deeper rundown of content design and UX writing.
Website
The website was a key channel for explaining the Zing proposition, educating users and driving app downloads.
The Zing website constantly iterated to optimize for customer acquisition. I supported the website team with copy, content management and drafting lo-fi pages for designers and developers to build on.
I worked with digital managers to test messages, create SEO-friendly articles and create tailored landing pages to support various acquisition campaigns.
Brand campaigns
I supported marketing managers and partner agencies in conceiving and executing campaigns pushed across our owned, earned and paid media channels.
Lightning-fast payments launched with Indian Rupees poised as its most lucrative currency. We targeted India- and UK-based remitters across TV, radio, events and digitally to make rupee-senders aware of Zing's low rates, high speeds and great service.
Surprizing Rewards, our monthly prize draw campaign, used influencers, PR, CRM and social media to tell customers which international destination they could win a trip to next. The entry mechanics changed a lot to optimize for attraction and relevance.
Brentford FC welcomed Zing as its official sponsorship partner. We developed branded assets for events and merch, and used social media to cross-promote in the name of awareness.
CRM campaigns
Emails, push notifications and in-app content were critical for sustaining the customer experience, supporting timely service and marketing efforts, and driving customer action and advocacy.
I worked with the CRM team to create and launch many campaigns, from the foundational to the experimental. CRM comms were integral to express brand and make a helpful, meaningful product where creative copy mattered as much as understanding technical limitations and workarounds in expression.
Tap the button for a deeper rundown of CRM campaigns
Social campaigns
Zing used social media to improve brand awareness, drive sign-ups, support multi-channel marketing campaigns, experiment with brand expression and deliver engaging product education and irreverent entertainment.
As part of the approval chain in creating and releasing regular content, I edited and aligned messaging on social media output to fit brand strategy and keep propositions accurate and honest – from captions and stills to influencer scripts and in-house videos.
Video
From demos to promotional ads, video was prioritized to express the character of the Zing brand and spell out our propositions in engaging ways.
I was often involved in writing or aligning scripts for creatives to enhance, and managing feedback from legal, risk and other diverse stakeholders.
Systems
As Zing prepared to become an international player, we officiated processes to reduce chaos, accommodate growth and mitigate informal, ad hoc tasks that can slow and distract teams.
I created a briefing engine connected to Jira and Slack for copywriters and visual designers to receive better briefs from the whole team. I also ran copywriter planning meetings using a Kanban board to track tasks, foresee obstacles and manage workloads accordingly.
It didn't go anywhere, but we were due to upgrade to a creative- and marketing-oriented workflow management tool to replace Jira, of which I helped make the business and budgeting case for.
Editorial
Zing shut down. Before its closure, I led a project to memorialize all our efforts in a 120+ page book to give to all employees, capturing the story of Zing from idea to sunset, our achievements, milestones, metrics, and our zaniest moments.
This was received enthusiastically as a great way to own and close the Zing chapter for everyone's careers. From research and copy to design and production, I made the book happen within deadline against capacity limits to a high standard.
HSBC's archiving team even took a copy of the book to have a detailed record of Zing being part of the bank's history.