Financial platform naming

Background & Challenge

Moody’s Corporation is best known for its credit rating services, but the company is also a top provider of risk management software and services. This division has grown exponentially in the past decade and become a top provider of tools that turn risk into opportunity. Moody’s saw that existing products only addressed one or two of the three primary risk-related relationships: customer, supply chain & other third parties, and trade credit. This siloing was not just inefficient, but ineffective and costly. Moody’s developed a platform to address all areas with intuitive design and powerful data resources. 

This new thinking extended to brand strategy as well. Services would now be delivered through a unified platform rather than individual products, and the platform name needed to both communicate the platform’s many benefits and signal the company’s growth as a cutting-edge SaaS provider (“not your father’s Moody’s”). The company turned to Catchword to develop a brand architecture and naming protocols for the risk management portfolio and a name and descriptor for the new platform. 

Strategy & Naming

We interviewed key stakeholders and customers, identified audiences, mapped out the competitive landscape, and developed messaging, tone, and other naming parameters. To focus attention and marketing dollars on the unified experience, we recommended that the platform alone receive a brand name. Features and components would not be named. 

After two rounds of creative exploration, more than 2,000 names, the client selected Maxsight, which succinctly expresses the comprehensive vision and optimized insight the platform provides. The name’s straightforward and punchy vocabulary express a modern sensibility—strong and streamlined yet entirely accessible. The name feels strong and active, underscoring that this information leads to action. Maxsight provides rich territory for marketing copy and campaigns, while the alliteration with Moody’s aids memorability. The client team chose the descriptor Unified Risk Platform, which is similarly to-the-point, clearly identifying the service area.

Outcome

The client adopted all our strategy and architecture recommendations and announced Maxsight in late 2024. The Moody’s team commented on the insight of our questions and the transparency (and enjoyability) of our process. The site headline easily weds the descriptor and name “Unified risk management for maximum insight” and makes good use of the vision concept (“holistic picture of risk that can be viewed through different lenses”).