Why OpenFX Chose Green In A Sea of Blue

The sea of sameness.

Walk the floor at any payments conference and the brands start to blur together. FXC Intelligence recently put numbers to why. Across 144 companies in the sector, 63 percent carried a shade of blue in their brand palette and 42 percent led with it. Red, the next most common color, trailed at a paltry 17 percent, and most of that was concentrated in legacy banking firms.

Money20/20 Europe was a sea of blue, we saw it and so did FXC. More telling, half the companies leading with blue are using essentially the same blue, close enough that you could swap two logos and might not even notice.

Why? While aping color schemes is common across industries, this seems like something else.

And that something is trust. In the payments space trust is hard to come by, particularly for fintechs trying to add a sheen of credibility to a technology like stablecoins that has often been seen as speculative.

Blue is a “trustworthy” color. A handful of highly credible, highly profitable institutions wore it first, and now everyone else is hoping to absorb some of that credibility for free. No one in FX ever lost a job because they created a blue logo.

The same move, one layer up

This is another mutation of an instinct we have spent most of our time arguing against, the tendency towards copying what came before, despite the fact that “what came before,” doesn’t work well for most of the world.

Cross-border payments still largely run on rails built decades ago for a handful of G7 currencies, tuned to their hours and their correspondent banks, with the rest of the world having to adapt.

Even in the fintech space, we see the same tendency to copy, many of the companies supposedly “remaking finance” with stablecoins still essentially act as wrappers over traditional banking.

The speed of stablecoins hides the complexity of everything else, and the companies that don’t optimize around “everything else” just end up putting a new coat of paint on bad ideas.

Speaking of, blue does the same thing for a brand that reaching for old rails does to a payment, trades the nuance required to solve the problem for simple legibility.

Moving beyond the blue

Traditional finance began in New York and asked, “what if we make everywhere else look like New York?”

A sea of sameness.

We are taking another approach, we understand that every corridor requires a slightly different solution, so we are creating systems flexible enough to support the nuance of each.

While we are committed to automating the rails, we don’t want to treat the problem like it was mechanical. We know that the dollars moving through these corridors fund businesses and support families, payrolls and remittances, money that is often desperately needed and structurally insecure.

Dollars that drive growth, that drive change.

Blue didn’t seem like the best way to represent a brand like that, a brand that needs to remain meaningful from Lagos to Manila to, yes, New York.

That’s why we decided to go with a color that captures the essence of growth across dozens of cultures – green.

Why green?

Growth as green's meaning goes back further than any branding survey. The ancient Egyptian word for green, wadj, doubled as the word for "to flourish." It named the color of the papyrus marsh and the god Osiris, who was painted green to mark his power over vegetation and his own return to life. A very different tradition arrived at nearly the same place from the other direction. In the Quran, paradise is described as gardens with rivers running beneath them, and the righteous are dressed there in green. Two civilizations, thousands of miles and thousands of years apart, landed on the same color for the same idea: green as the color of things that are alive and growing.

Researchers have tested this too. A 2025 review pulled together 128 years of published research on color and emotion, 132 studies, more than 42,000 participants, 64 countries, and found that green consistently comes back positive and calm. The single most common word people reach for when describing it is some version of relaxed, peaceful, or calm, showing up in a third of the studies that measured it, more than any other association by a wide margin.

Miranda McIntyre, who leads brand here, put it well when she said, "Green rarely carries negative connotations anywhere. It's not the color of danger, warning, or error." It’s the sort of color that travels.

But still

We aren’t fooling ourselves into thinking that green is some universal good, the perfect brand color with no negative connotations anywhere. That kind of reductive thinking was exactly the mistake that traditional finance has made for the last century.

In China, a man whose wife is cheating on him is said to be "wearing a green hat." The idiom traces back to the Yuan Dynasty. Eight hundred years later, a green baseball cap is still a bad gift to bring someone there, even though green is otherwise a strongly positive color, tied to health, growth, and harmony.

Red (the traditional banking color, remember?) carries a stranger split. In the West, red is the color of financial trouble. European bookkeepers spent centuries writing debts and losses in red ink, profits in black, which is where "in the red" comes from. In China, red means close to the opposite. It's the color of luck, protection, and prosperity, wrapped literally around money in the red envelopes given at weddings and New Year. The custom carried straight into modern finance, where red is often used in the UX to denote gift payments.

All colors carry baggage, that’s not the point. The point is that rather than defaulting to a color because “everyone else is doing it,” we think that a bit more nuance and a bit more attention is always worth the trouble.