Creative Director, Brand (Up)

About Ferocia

Ferocia is a team of more than 300 people building better financial experiences for Australians.

As the digital division of Bendigo Bank, our work spans Up, a digital bank; Connect, the platform powering Bendigo Bank’s web and mobile banking; and tools that make managing money simpler and help protect people from scams and fraud.

Our shared purpose: helping people feel more confident and in control of their money.

Sound like something you’d like to be part of? We’d love to hear from you.

The Role

• Title: Creative Director, Brand (Up)

• Reporting to: Head of Brand & Growth

• Direct reports: Brand Designers, Copywriters, Producers, Animators

The Vibe

We aren’t building a bank. We’re building a high-performance financial tool for a digital-native generation, helping an entire cohort of Australians feel good about money.

At Up, Brand is affectionately and intentionally called Team Soul. You are the steward of how Up looks, speaks, moves, and feels. This role is our creative engine - the tightrope walk between keeping Up an irreverent, cult-favourite brand while evolving our appeal to meet an increasingly mature, mainstream audience without losing an ounce of our edge.

You’re not the "Brand Police" setting arbitrary rules in a PDF nobody reads. You’re the Brand Pilot - guiding a world-class in-house creative studio, navigating the space between high-tech product polish and subcultural playfulness, and proving that building a brand people genuinely love is the ultimate growth lever.

What You’ll Do

Creative vision & brand strategy

• Evolve the brand beyond the niche: Lead the creative charge as Up scales. You’ll protect the irreverence, wit, and cultural resonance that got us here, while having the strategic maturity to critically assess and broaden our appeal to win over a wider, more mature market.

• Narrative & cultural moments: You don’t just manage a production calendar; you direct a narrative. You’ll own how we "build in public," turning product updates, releases, and financial concepts into cultural moments that Upsiders actually talk about.

• Aesthetic direction across every medium: Direct a visual and verbal identity that feels closer to a top-tier game studio, streetwear label, or editorial publication than a financial institution. Your standard of polish signals uncompromising quality and trust - showing people that while we’re playful, we take their money seriously.

• The experimental sandbox: Champion the weird, the clever, and the unexpected - from Easter eggs and real-world stunts to drops, merch, and side-projects that don't always have a neat ROI model on day one, but make Up feel electric and alive.

People leadership & craft stewardship

• Lead Team Soul: Foster, mentor, and inspire a tight-knit crew of talented designers, writers, illustrators, and producers. You set the bar for craft and taste while giving people the autonomy to do the best work of their careers.

• Build a sustainable creative pace: Our creative crew is passionate about making everything they touch amazing. You’ll be the champion who sets clear boundaries and filters the distractions, ensuring the team has the runway to say "not right now" to the small stuff and pour their talent into the projects that create the greatest impact for Upsiders.

• Champion our open, curious creative culture: Bring your own perspective to an already deeply engaged team. You’ll foster healthy, spirited creative debate, encourage early idea-sharing, and keep our creative process fluid, experimental, and outwardly inspired.

Cross-functional collaboration & impact

• Key leadership partnership: Reporting directly to the Head of Brand & Growth, and working as a close peer to the Growth Team Lead, you will be our creative authority in strategy and decision making. You bring the creative vision, craft leadership, and brand intuition to the group - with the backing and expectation to constructively challenge performance-first assumptions when brand equity or craft is at stake.

• Bake the brand into the code: Work in close partnership with product, software engineers, and product designers. Ensure the brand isn't just a marketing wrapper slapped on at the end, but embedded directly into the app experience - from micro-interactions and UI copy to the way a transaction is described in the feed.

• Regulated, never boring: Understand Australian financial guardrails, but treat them as a creative constraint to play with rather than an excuse to play it safe.

• Curate external partners: When we tap external directors, production houses, illustrators, or agencies, you are the filter. You ensure external collaborations hit our high bar for craft, taste, and native Up feel.

Who You Are

We care far more about your eye, your taste, and how you inspire humans than a conventional list of corporate credentials. No candidate will tick every single box, but we’re looking for someone who has more "yeses" than "nos":

• Proven creative direction and leadership: You have experience leading brand strategy, art direction, and creative teams - whether client-side at a high-growth brand or leading work at an adventurous agency/studio. You have managed, mentored, and directly led a creative team (designers, writers, art directors, or producers) and know how to develop creative talent, hold a high craft bar, not just direct the work.

• A versatile, expressive portfolio: You can move between aesthetics - from loud and playful to elevated, typographic, and refined. We create a mini brand identity for every feature we release, and they all need to look unique, but related. You know when to align the grid and when to ignore it. We break more rules than we follow here.

• Impeccable taste & eye for detail: Your work demonstrates industry leading art direction, web design, typography and illustration - storytelling across print, social and experiential activations.

• Strategic backbone: You understand brand positioning and commercial realities. You can speak to why a creative decision serves the long-term health of the business and aren't afraid to push back when numbers-led thinking threatens brand value. Just as importantly, you know our job isn't to put the brand in bubble wrap - you’re excited to actively evolve and mature our identity so it keeps pace as Up scales to reach a broader audience.

• A rebellious streak: You are naturally allergic to corporate clichés, "bank-speak", and playing it safe. You want to make work that provokes a genuine emotional reaction.

How to Apply

Along with your CV or LinkedIn, please share a link to your portfolio.

We want to see recent work where you had hands-on creative or directional ownership. Tell us the context of the projects, what your specific role was, and show us what you made and why it mattered.

Working at Ferocia

We work flexibly, with genuine autonomy over where and when you do your best work. Ferocians can use our Melbourne CBD office as much or as little as makes sense for them.

We also value spending time together face to face, with teams making time to meet in person when it matters. That’s why we’re currently only hiring people based in Naarm/Melbourne and surrounding areas.

Here’s some of what you can expect:

• Smart, passionate people who care about what they make.

• Generous leave and parental policies.

• Flexibility and genuine autonomy over your time.

• A great CBD office with a rooftop, gym and personal trainer.

• A budget for personal development, training and conferences.

• An Employee Assistance Program.

• Home loan rebates (conditions apply).

• Ongoing bonus and equity grants (conditions apply).

Unsure if you tick every box? Throw your hat in the ring anyway. We value different experiences and perspectives, so we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement. You might be just who we’re looking for.