Wanting to create an elite investment bank, my first idea was to go down the traditional path, and to attempt and re-create the same atmosphere that was communicated by other high-end 'Wall Street' investment banks.
The feedback I received was that "the bank should communicate something new, moving away from the traditions, and the atmosphere created by investment banks in the past".
This feedback was directed towards the financial crisis of 2007. The precipitating factor of this crisis was a high default rate in the subprime home mortgage sector. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was an increase in the issuance of bonds backed by mortgages, also knows as mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). Investment banks were buying mortgages from mortgage issuers, repackaging them and selling off specific tranches of the debt to investors. As time went on, there were less and less new mortgages to pool the debt off and issue assets based off of, so the banks started repackaging MBSs by collecting the unsellable tranches and selling them as new product - called collateralised debt obligations or CDOs. In theory, the pooling of these mortgages reduced risk and seemed as if the assets would be safe, when in reality the majority of these mortgages were of poor quality (subprime). The rating agencies who rated the quality of MBSs and CDOs did not fully appreciate these subprime mortgages, and as a result ended up rating them with the highest AAA rating. From the viewpoint of the investment banks, this was a goldmine. The AAA assets required little capital to borrow against and essentially provided them with a free return. The US and global banks went on a massive spending spree, borrowing vasts amount of money short term to fund their investments. Investment banks had leverage ratios of 30x or even higher. Some of the top investment banks such as Morgan Staley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were almost entirely funded by short term borrowing.
By the mid 2000s, there were hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mortgages given to individuals with poor credit rating on adjustable rates. These mortgages typically required a low interest payment for the first few years, but then increased for the years to follow. There was no possible way that subprime borrows could afford the higher repayment rates. And when house prices stopped rising and started to fall, homeowners could no longer refinance or remortgage their homes for cash. So the whole system started to default. Suddenly, tranches of CDOs and MBSs started getting wiped out, and investors started to lose confidence in the top AAA tranches and the banks which held large amounts of them. In June 2007, many banks started seeing huge loses due to exposure to subprime assets. Billions of dollars worth of client money was lost. It all kept going downhill from there, and even today there are traces left of the effect this global crisis had.
In relation to my project, I realised that wanting to create a trustworthy high-end investment bank, focusing on the traditional appearance of typical investment banks would be inappropriate. People stopped trusting investment banks after the crash of 2007, and became more careful and judgemental. I needed to take a completely different approach to the design of my logotype.
Another bit of feedback I received was that instead of Bodoni I should use "Helevtica [and] make it a new and fresh investment bank". I really liked this idea because I feel it is a challenge. Helvetica being a very neutral and uncharacterised typeface, I think it would be a quite an interesting design exploration and juxtaposition to try and give it some personality as well as making it seem sophisticated, trustworthy and "new".
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