20 Dec USAA for militaries’ financial services
United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a financial company that provides insurance and other financial services to the people who served in the United States army and their family members as well. A group of 25 army officers established the company in 1922 in order to insure themselves and their automobiles as they were not able to be insured in any other company in the industry due to the high risk category in which they were considered. The company former name was United States Army Automobile Association. But in 1924, the name was changed to United Services Automobile Association when members from other military sectors were enabled to enroll and covered by the company’s services. After that the company extended its activities to include banking, brokerage and related insurance services to the current and former army members.
Having more than 20,000 employees, USAA is considered from the early companies that applied direct marketing in their process and having business done through telephone calls and internet. The current headquarter is located in San Antonio in Texas and the current CEO is Josue Robles.
The original USAA logo
So, what do you see and feel when you first look at the corporate logo. For sure, you see an eagle or falcon head with some parallel lines on the two sides of the head, and the initials of the name of the corporation written in capital letters, having the same color as that of the upper logo. USAA logo was presented in many versions, all of them have typically the same design and logo, but with just different colors varying from light blue, dark blue and black. And there is one version with white colors with a dark blue background, creating a great contrast making this version the most appealing one.
It is very obvious that the logo looks at the first glance that is related to a martial entity, or an aviation institute, although it is very sharp and strong logo, but it needs to be redesigned to reveal the financial part of business. When it comes to money, for sure it would be highly preferable to show that.
USAA employees reached more than 23,000 in 2012, working through many offices spread across the states. Property, casualty and life insurance are not the only business line that USAA work in, it also offers other financial services like banking and financial planning , exclusively and strictly eligible to army members and their direct families. Serving certain class of people, that is what it makes them very unique in the business, which mainly depends –like any other business-on gaining market share as much as possible.
One of the “100 Best companies to work for”, this title was given by Fortune for USAA in 2011. Also USAA Bank, one of the subsidiaries working in financial services, ranked first among the best companies competition in “The customer experience index” by Forrester Research in 2011 also.