At Parafin, growth is at the core of what we do. But by early 2025, our own brand identity wasn’t reflecting our momentum. Over the past few months, we've collaborated with a talented design agency to refresh our brand system. Today, we’re thrilled to share that evolution — designed to be cleaner, more accessible, and scalable. This refreshed identity represents not just who Parafin is today, but the ambitious future we’re building toward.
In this post, we'll share our process and key leanings from building the new system.
Parafin is an embedded finance company that helps platforms offer financial products to small businesses. We simplify complex tasks like underwriting, compliance, and customer support, making it easier for marketplaces and payment processors to provide financial services for their merchants.
We currently offer four different products and tools that are all essential to our business: Capital (Cash Advance, Flex loan, Term loan), Pay Over Time, Spend Card and Partner Dashboard. Most of our merchant-facing products are white-labeled, using each partner's primary color and logo. Partners customize their businesses’ experience through the Partner Dashboard.
The Design team maintains two distinct design systems. The Parafin Design System serves Parafin-branded interfaces such as the Partner Dashboard, sales materials, and the website. Meanwhile, the White-labeled Design System powers our web SDK and is intentionally designed to look different from the Parafin brand since it's meant to be customized by partners. Balancing these two systems means the team owns a broad design surface area: we must enable partners to create experiences that feel fully theirs while also ensuring Parafin’s own brand is cohesive, recognizable, and elevated. Historically, we’ve focused heavily on the white-labeled side to empower our partners. Now, we have the opportunity to invest in our own design language, giving Parafin’s brand the same level of craft and attention that we bring to our partner experiences.
Our mission to grow small businesses has not changed, however the scale of our mission has. We now power financial products for some of the world's largest platforms. Over time, our website audience has shifted — we're increasingly seeing traditional SMBs visit to learn who we are. With that in mind, we needed an identity that reflected our business while feeling as approachable as the partners we serve.
Parafin’s original look was born in its scrappy start-up days. It was serviceable and easy to ship quickly. But as our product suite, partner list, and use cases grew, key limitations became clear:
Over ten focused weeks, we evolved Parafin’s brand from an initial concept into a fully operational brand system. The process was intentionally front-loaded with research and voice definition, then shifted into rapid visual exploration and structured rollout. Each phase built on the previous one — giving teams clear checkpoints to validate direction, stress-test ideas, and lock in guidelines before code ever ships.
We extracted key attributes from our content style guide — professional, respectful, reliable, approachable, etc. These weren't just abstract concepts, they served as concrete design requirements that guided our visual decisions.
We explored everything from high-energy neons often associated with tech and crypto aesthetics to understated neutrals that lacked depth and vitality. Finding a palette that stood out from other fintech platforms without alienating traditional SMBs was challenging. After iterating through 20+ shades, we landed on a hue that balanced energy, reliability, and professionalism.
Green remains our primary color, symbolizing growth and trust, but now it’s supported by a palette that scales better with our products and channels. We also incorporated light and dark text gradients for headlines to create visual impact and reinforce our brand identity.
Our new illustration style achieves the perfect balance between professional fintech elements (graphs, credit cards, upward arrows) and approachable, soft, friendly strokes. We use illustrations as a key part of our visual identity to create a distinctive expression and strengthen brand recognition. The illustrations support our message of empowering small businesses to grow.
We standardized our typography. We’re using Inter for our user interfaces and we added Inter Tight for headlines on the website and slide decks. Both are open-source Google fonts, which means:
We considered commissioning a custom typeface but opted for Inter and Inter Tight to stay on schedule. The trade-off: no bespoke letterforms, but immediate multi-platform consistency.
Our Partner Dashboard has been refreshed with a modern look and feel, featuring an updated navigation that improves user workflow, redesigned status pills that communicate information more clearly, and enhanced graphs with improved data visualization capabilities. These visual improvements not only make the dashboard more aesthetically pleasing but also increase functionality and usability for our partners, allowing them to navigate and interpret data more efficiently.
As part of this initiative, we also updated our Parafin design system variables in Figma. We implemented semantic naming for our design tokens to ensure consistent implementation across Figma, code, and marketing templates. This approach gives each color a purposeful name such as `sidebar-bg`, `text-black-primary`, and `gray-border`.
We created a unique icon for each product to enhance the website and documentation experience. Each icon draws inspiration from what it represents — different bar shapes for repayment plans, cards for Spend Card, and so on. While grounded in these concepts, the icons remain intentionally abstract to feel modern, scalable, and adaptable across contexts.
A refreshed identity doesn’t change who we are, it clarifies it. We’re still dedicated to helping platforms empower small businesses with fast, flexible capital. Our new system simply tells that story with more coherence, warmth, and confidence.
This brand refresh was a true cross-functional sprint. Huge thanks to our contractor partner, the in-house Design and Marketing squads, and every engineer who swapped a hex code at midnight to make launch day happen. Your craftsmanship and commitment to small-business growth powered every pixel.
Written by Emma Lundin, Head of Design at Parafin
Interested in joining Parafin? We’re hiring. Check out our open roles.
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