Building a Global Brand System from the Inside Out

The Context

When XBP Europe — a regional brand of Exela Technologies focused on bill and payment exchange services — acquired Exela and rebranded as XBP Global, it created both an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity: build a genuinely global brand from the ground up, one that could unify three regional identities (XBP Americas, XBP Europe, XBP Asia) under a single coherent system. The problem: do it across nine business units, three continents, and an organization that had never operated under a unified brand before.

My Role

I came in as Senior Design Lead and Brand Strategist — embedded in the organization, working directly with internal stakeholders and senior leadership to define the brand from its foundation and build the infrastructure that would make it scalable. This wasn't a refresh. It was a full rebuild: mission, vision, values, positioning, visual identity, design system, and the AI-enabled creative tools that let a global team produce brand-consistent work without coming to me for every asset.

The Rebrand

The first work was strategic. I led the repositioning process — working with leadership across regions to define what XBP Global actually stood for as a unified entity, not just a collection of legacy business units. That meant facilitating the hard conversations: what do we keep, what do we leave behind, what do we want to be known for?

The result was a clear positioning and a refreshed mission, vision, and values framework that gave the new global brand something real to stand on — not just a new logo, but a reason to exist as a single company.

The visual identity followed from that foundation. A system built for global scale: flexible enough to accommodate regional variation across Americas, Europe, and Asia, consistent enough that every touchpoint felt unmistakably XBP.

The Brand System

With the identity locked, I built the infrastructure that would make it live in practice.

That meant comprehensive brand guidelines, a full icon set replacing inconsistent emoji-based shorthand with brand-consistent SVGs, presentation templates, a brand portal that serves as the central source of truth for the entire organization, and a design system that gives the team what they need to produce consistently excellent work independently.

The goal was always the same: make brand consistency the path of least resistance for everyone who touches it.

The AI Creative System

The most forward-looking part of the work was building XBP's AI-enabled image generation infrastructure — a system designed to solve a specific problem: how does a lean creative team produce brand-safe, on-brand imagery at the pace a global marketing organization actually needs?

The answer was the Threshold Prompt Builder — a custom HTML tool I designed and built that guides anyone in the organization through generating brand-consistent AI images using Adobe Firefly. It's not a simple prompt library. It's a structured creative tool with three modes — People, Detail, and Environment — each with configurable parameters for subject, setting, lighting, tone, framing, and more. It encodes XBP's visual standards directly into the interface: locked brand color values, negative prompts that prevent off-brand outputs, a built-in brand name guard that flags third-party trademarks in generated prompts, and a save/load system for reusing successful prompts across campaigns.

The result is that anyone in marketing, proposals, or design can generate photography-quality, brand-safe images in minutes — without needing to understand prompt engineering or risk producing something off-brand.

The Outcome

The numbers tell part of the story. Asset production time dropped by 75%. Campaign creative that previously took two to three weeks now takes two to three days. The brand system serves nine business units across three continents — design team, marketing, proposals, and leadership — from a single source of truth.

But the more important outcome is consistency. XBP now shows up the same way everywhere it shows up. That's not a small thing for a company that assembled itself from regional acquisitions and legacy identities. A unified brand is what makes a global company feel like one company.