How should a bank move? Buff sets Starling’s brand in motion

Following its 2025 rebrand, Starling approached Brighton-based motion studio Buff to make a run of short films promoting features across its app and website. The app-based UK bank had paused much of its marketing while it built out its product, and by the time the rebrand launched – with a mission to help people be ‘Good with money’ – it had a mature set of tools, from budgeting and payments to saving and managing debt, that many customers had never noticed. Rather than produce the brief as 16 social films, Buff used it as an opportunity to answer the question the rebrand had left wide open: how should the refreshed brand behave in motion? The outcome is a motion framework, a set of principles and behaviours made to outlast the campaign that prompted it. Starling wanted the films to feel vibrant and scroll-stopping while still feeling right for a financial brand. Lean too far into explanation and they would become product walkthroughs; lean too far into play and they would chip at the confidence and trust a bank depends on. The refreshed identity was well defined, but no motion system yet existed to support it. “Trust is something a bank has to earn rather than claim. You build it by communicating with clarity, confidence and consistency at every touchpoint,” Creative Director Tom Allen explains. “When the way a brand moves consistently reinforces the values that underpin everything else, people stop noticing the animation itself and simply feel that the brand behaves as it should.” “Starling’s brand isn’t built around wealth. It’s built around confidence,” Allen tells us, and, alongside that, the team saw the bank as a distinctly human one. Those two attributes became the project’s guiding principles, and Buff’s mandate was to define how such an abstract quality should translate into motion. Doing that frame by frame meant treating confidence less as a visual style than as a set of behaviours: how quickly something should appear, how it should enter the frame, how much to reveal at once, where to send the viewer’s attention next. “We weren’t creating a style guide; we were establishing a way of thinking,” Creative Team Lead Myungeun Kim explains. What that thinking produced was, in Allen’s words, “direct, purposeful movement with a playful human confidence” – fast and efficient in its short, smooth easing, with room for a flourish wherever the brand’s human side needed to surface.