VARO BANK
Creative Director, 2018-2021
I joined Varo with the opportunity to be headcount #1 on creative. I was responsible for building the Varo Studio team, establishing the creative vision, and scaling campaign output across every channel—all while the company was raising successive funding rounds and racing toward a historic milestone: becoming the first digital bank to receive a National Bank Charter.
Over four years, I grew the creative function from a solo operation into a multi-disciplinary studio spanning brand design, integrated campaigns, video production, experiential marketing, and content strategy. I led internal teams and external, specialized agencies through fundraising rounds B, C, and D, collaborating closely with leadership to ensure creative output kept pace with the company’s explosive growth.
Beyond the work itself, I’m proud that the relationships built during this chapter endure. To this day, the Varo Dinner Club—a group of former colleagues and collaborators—meets once a month. That’s not a footnote. It’s a testament to the culture we built together.
Campaign: A Bank for All of Us
The “A Bank for All of Us” campaign put Varo’s customers at the very core of its brand identity. We reimagined American currency, placing real, diverse faces where historical figures typically sit. This wasn’t stock photography diversity—it was portraiture with weight, crafted to feel monumental.
We hired artists to hand-paint large-scale murals of the campaign artwork across major American cities, turning the brand into public art. The murals became landmarks—people posed in front of them, shared them on social media, and organically extended the campaign’s reach far beyond paid placements.
To deepen the interactive experience, we built a custom Snapchat AR filter that let users envision themselves on currency. The filter was a viral hit, generating millions of impressions and creating a sense of personal ownership over the brand’s message. (I may or may not have snapped about 200 selfies.)
Digital display and programmatic, paid and organic social media, out-of-home murals and billboards across 6 major U.S. cities, Snapchat AR filter, experiential street-level activations, earned press and media coverage.
+312%
Unaided Brand Awareness Lift
$5.1m
Earned Media Value
48m
OOH Impressions Nationwide
August de los Reyes
”Ryan grew our design team from scratch and built relationships with trust. He is a gifted communicator and his leadership is felt across the entire organization.
A true renaissance man, his talent stretches far and wide, across many mediums. He is in a word, prolific”
Christine Deng, Brand Designer
“With Ryan as a mentor, I learned how to build integrated campaigns, strategize brand pitches, and examine visual storytelling as a form of brand expression. I was happy to work with someone as endearingly bold, yet humble and absolutely creative.”
Genine Lobo, Integrated Marketing
“Ryan’s natural ability to build rapport with employees across the company allowed us to accomplish so much during his tenure. With Ryan’s leadership, he pushed our creative limits to think bigger, to create marketing that was different from our many competitors, and to inspire the entire company to feel proud of the work with his clever storytelling skills.”
Campaign: Customer Voices
The “Customer Voices” campaign featured real Varo customers telling real stories about how the platform’s tools and features helped them navigate finance day to day. These weren’t scripted testimonials—they were documentary-style narratives, grounded in authenticity.
We collaborated with Stefan Ruiz, the renowned photographer known for his intimate, humanistic portraiture, to document this series. Stefan’s lens brought an editorial quality to the campaign that elevated it far beyond typical fintech advertising. Every image felt like it belonged in a magazine feature, not a banner ad.
The campaign was deployed across an extensive media mix: web landing pages and in-app placements, print advertising, out-of-home placements, paid and organic social, connected TV (CTV), and broadcast television. This was Varo’s most ambitious multi-channel push, and the creative was designed to be modular—each customer story could stand alone or work as part of the broader series.
3.1m
3.1 Minutes Time-On-Site up from 1.14s
+18%
NPS Score, Customer Satisfacti
22m
Organic Social Media Views
Internal/HR: The History of Varo
My time at Varo Bank was a once-in-a-career chapter. Building a creative studio from nothing, inside a company that was simultaneously reinventing an entire industry, demanded equal parts vision, grit, and humility. The campaigns we built didn’t just drive numbers—they changed how people thought about what a bank could look and feel like.
The work lives on in the brand equity Varo carries today, in the careers of the designers and marketers I had the privilege of mentoring, and in the monthly dinners where we still gather to break bread and tell stories about the wild, beautiful ride we shared.