A Copenhagen studio rebranded a Nigerian bank — then the bank’s own team shipped it in a week

What does a Copenhagen design studio know about Nigerian banking? Enough, it turns out, to fly to Lagos and find out. Barkas, a Copenhagen creative studio, has rebranded Kuda, a Nigerian digital bank, around a central idea called “More Life” — a phrase rooted in Jamaican dancehall culture, carrying a sense of abundance, possibility and wishing someone well.

The identity is a deliberate break from banking’s usual visual language: a bold, geometric wordmark with KUDA stacked, a custom typeface — Kuda Modena, designed by Erkin Karamemet — set alongside Suisse International, deep purple anchoring personal banking and black giving Kuda Business its own identity, plus a custom Naira symbol that brings a local reference directly into the system. Photography by Rachel Seidu and illustrations by Charles Owen and Adene Muyiwa build out a world of everyday life, with motion design by John Mu’azu. Barkas also designed the website and an app concept.

The studio’s team travelled from Copenhagen to Lagos to get a feel for the place before designing for it — the art, the architecture, the music, the colours, the pace of everyday life — rather than building an identity for a Nigerian business based on what they thought Nigeria looked like. It is a small detail that decides whether cross-border work is collaboration or guesswork.

But the rebrand is only half the story, and the second half is the more useful lesson for small teams. Kuda’s own product team, led by product designer and design-system lead Pelumi Abimbola, rebuilt the company’s design system — Kuda Design System 2.0 — to carry the new identity across retail and business banking, web, iOS and Android. By his account, around 80% of the visual updates could be made through the design system, and most of the existing app was reskinned in less than a week. The identity was the launch; the system was what made it real.

As the Barkas team itself notes, a new identity does not make a product better — it can change how people perceive a business and make it more recognisable, but if the app is frustrating or the service does not deliver, a new wordmark will not fix that. Brand and product have to earn their place independently. For any small team planning a rebrand, Kuda is the case study to copy: budget for the system, not just the launch, and keep the rollout in the hands of the people who live with the product every day.

Source: Copenhagen Moodboard, “What happens when a Copenhagen design studio meets Nigerian banking?”