Five minutes with Jamie Thorp
Jamie Thorp, creative lead at Reed Words, discusses his agency’s Gold-winning work for Zempler Bank at the Transform Awards Europe 2026.
Could you tell me a little bit about Zempler Bank and who they are, and why the client came to you in the first place?
Zempler was originally called Cashplus when they were founded around twenty years ago. Obviously, a name like Cashplus made sense then, when people actually used cash, but they’ve pivoted to being a much more tech-savvy, advanced, mainly digital banking brand.
Since they were founded, they got a banking licence, which is one of only a few that have been handed out in the last fifteen years. Cashplus, when you hear that name, makes you think of payday loans or kind of Wonga.com vibes. They needed to sound more premium; they needed to feel advanced and tech-forward, which cash is the opposite of.
They also needed a name that spoke to their ethos, which is that historically they’ve always accepted small businesses that maybe wouldn’t have got loans or accounts with the big banks. The owners of those businesses are spinning a lot of plates, so the brand has always been about making their lives as easy as possible, and everything they build is centred on that. So yeah, that’s why they needed a new name.
And when did the name Zempler appear in the process?
We plan every naming process to have three stages. So, the first stage is the first group of names: we get some feedback, see what’s resonating and what isn’t, and narrow that down for the next stage. Then we do the same for the third stage. It means there’s a definite end point.
Zempler appeared in stage one – a mix of "simpler" and "exemplary.” We thought it was pretty good – and the client liked it too. But it wasn’t a lightbulb moment where everyone saw it and said, “That’s the name, we can cancel the rest of the project.” We still went through the other stages.
By the end, I think we had about 30 names shortlisted in total, gradually whittling that down. Eventually, we settled on Zempler once we mapped it against the strategy and the criteria for what a good name looks like for this project and what we wanted the name to do. It started to click that Zempler did all of it.
Some names are kind of sleeper hits — you have them in stage one, and they just sort of bob along for the next few weeks or even months. Then suddenly everyone’s in agreement that this is the name, and you go for it. And then a week later, it feels like, of course that was the name — it could never have been anything else.
What is it about the name that ticks all those boxes and makes it perfect?
The first thing is that it doesn’t have “cash” in it or anything that sounds like it’s from fifteen or twenty years ago. One of the big things it had to do was feel trustworthy – feel like a credible bank – but also be able to fit into a world where you have Monzos and Klaras and Starlings that feel techy and advanced. It had to live comfortably in that space and not feel slow or old-fashioned in comparison, but it also had to feel credible enough that you could compare it to something like a Barclays or HSBC.
So we wanted something that sat in the middle. It didn’t have to sound super advanced and techy, but it also couldn’t feel like a flash in the pan. The way the word is put together, it felt like it sat in roughly the right space. The ‘Z’ has that slightly techy, advanced feel, but it’s also quite a solid, robust word. So we liked how it sounds, how you say it, how you read it and how it looks.
A big part of modern name creation is securing both the trademark and the domain name. How difficult was that process?
Well, the benefit of having a made-up name like that is that you can see the words it is made from, but you are not going to find ‘Zempler’ in the dictionary. That helps a lot. It pretty much sailed through trademark checks. We had ‘Zemplar’ with an ‘a’ as a backup, but in the end we didn’t need it.
I think the holy grail for a name is being able to secure the dot com with nothing added to it. They managed to get zempler.com. They also own other related domains, like zemplerbank.com.
That partly came down to luck, but also partly because we made up an entirely new word. In the end, it made its way out into the world.
