Acorns was a Fast Company favorite, winning honors in 3 categories.
Fast Company named 398 winners and honorees in its annual Innovation by Design competition across all industries. A panel of expert judges chose the winners from among 3,000 applicants. As you can imagine, financial services are not generally at the forefront of international design. This year, just nine of the 398 were related to financial services, and only two were from a legacy providers, American Express and Bank of Canada. Three went to fintech investing platforms, two went to insurance startups, and 2 were to credit card processing wunderkinds, Stripe and Square.
Here are the nine (in alphabetic order):
- Acorns: The investment app was honored in three categories, Apps & Games, General Excellence, and User Experience for its new 2.0 version
- American Express’s design firm Pentagram was honored in the Graphic Design category for its work on American Express’s identity.
- Bank of Canada’s architectural firm Perkins + Will was honored in the Workplace category for its Head Office Renewal project
- Lemonade, the rental/home insurance provider, was honored in the User Experience category
- PolicyGenius, the life insurance quote aggregator, was honored in the Health category
- Robinhood, the free investing app, was honored in the Apps & Games category for its new crypto trading function
- Square’s new register was honored in the Products category
- Stripe was honored in the Website Design category for its redesign efforts
- Swell Investing was also honored in the Website Design category for its Transparent Investing Platform
