Octane Capital unveils new branding
Jonathan’s vision for how the company wants to present itself has changed since its conception in 2017. The rebrand has been designed to highlight the evolution of Octane, its personality, and the place it wants to carve for itself within the industry.
“As a natural process of business evolution, we wanted to tweak our brand, make it more contemporary and relevant to various things that we’re doing,” explains Jonathan Samuels, Octane’s CEO.
The previous logo incorporated a wave and a surfer theme, designed to demonstrate Octane’s appetite for the market’s most complicated deals, exemplifying the idea that, like waves, every loan is different. However, after seven years of trading, Octane’s proposition and position in the market have shifted.
“What we do has evolved, we’re now a far cheaper price proposition, we will compete heavily now with challenger banks on pricing. In many ways, we think of ourselves as a bridging lender with challenger bank pricing.”
“Whilst every loan is indeed different, we also want to recognise it’s not only large, complex loans that make up our book, we are also completing high levels of smaller, more straightforward loans too.”
Josh Knight, Octane’s sales and marketing director, notes that the launch of its variable rate bridging product in 2022 marked a notable change in the company’s market position. “When we launched the product we were – and, in many cases, still are – the cheapest option for brokers. This allows us to target better quality deals and borrowers. We want to align ourselves with active and ambitious property investors and this rebrand is a chance for us to do that. Our refurbishment product is well suited to this profile of borrower; it allows investors to increase a property’s value or improve its income potential.”
Josh also notes that many of the cases Octane are completing involve refurbishment works, whether that be refurbishment projects, conversions or developer exit cases on unfinished sites, and that the new branding will showcase that.
“The imagery that we use throughout our branding makes it clear that these are the types of projects we are completing at volume. The more of them you complete, the more adept you become at completing them, and the more synonymous the brand becomes with them.”
The rebrand also puts Octane’s team at its centre, as it’s the team who provide its brokers with high service levels and its them who embody the company’s culture. Jonathan explains “People buy from people. Rate is important and leverage is important, but that confidence of getting the deal done and knowing that you’ll deliver, is actually the most important thing.”
Josh added “We take what we do very seriously, but we have good fun doing it. We really wanted that personality we have internally to shine through the branding. We want to be a fun, vibrant, modern brand and we want people to have sense of that personality.”
Enabling progress is the theme which underpins the rebrand.
Josh concludes; “Whether it’s at process level – pushing our broker’s cases to completion, or whether at project level – helping our borrowers turn their ideas from plans to profit, we want to be known as the driving force behind that progress.”
