A local life company for the Straits Settlements.

Great Eastern was founded in Singapore in 1908. English Wikipedia says the Great Eastern Life Assurance Company was founded by Alfred Hewton Fair and incorporated on 26 August 1908. The company says Fair was a former general insurance agent who saw room for a local life assurance business shaped around the needs of the people of Malaya, at a time when several foreign insurers were already present.

From the start the company chose a lion. Great Eastern says it adopted the lion as its symbol with the local population of the time in mind, and that the animal stands for courage, strength and leadership. The firm’s own account of its emblem begins in 1908 with what it calls a Straits Settlements heritage crest. In 1910, the company says, the lion was redrawn in the style of the day and began to appear on policy documents and cheques, marking the papers that customers kept.

The business grew across the causeway early on. English Wikipedia says that in 1920 Great Eastern Life Assurance (Malaysia) began as a branch office of the Singapore company, and that a branch in Brunei followed in 1975 and a subsidiary in Indonesia in 1996. In November 1999 the life company was restructured as a wholly owned arm of a holding company, Great Eastern Holdings, which merged with the Overseas Assurance Corporation in December 2000.

The bank came next. English Wikipedia says that in June 2004 Great Eastern Holdings became a substantially owned subsidiary of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, OCBC, and that OCBC raised its stake after making a privatisation offer in 2024. The link to the bank is written into the brand itself: the company says that in 2004 an endorser line naming OCBC was added to its logo, and the 2025 refresh made the tagline read simply “An OCBC Company”.

Five lions in a century.

Great Eastern tells the history of its brand as the history of one animal. The company says the lion was simplified in 1950 while keeping its sense of authority, and redrawn again in 1970 in a more minimal style suited to the period. In 2001, in the company’s words, the lion was “freed from its cage” and turned eastward, a change it describes as a future-looking stance. That version, with the OCBC endorsement added from 2004, served for more than two decades.

The latest redraw was announced in Singapore and Malaysia in August 2025, as the company marked its 117th anniversary. Marketech APAC reported on 27 August 2025 that the insurer had introduced a redesigned corporate logo with an evolved lion motif and a bolder wordmark, to be applied progressively across its life, general, takaful and financial advisory businesses, and that the tagline had been revised to “An OCBC Company”. Group chief executive Greg Hingston spoke of a “refreshed identity” for the company’s next chapter.

Marketing-Interactive set out the meaning the company gives each part of the new lion: the tail for leadership and communication, the paw for confident forward strides, the mane for ambition and passion, and the eyes fixed on the future. It said the new branding would be rolled out across digital platforms, customer communications and physical sites, starting with the Great Eastern Centre on Pickering Street in Singapore.

The design work had an outside author. Campaign Asia reported on 9 September 2025 that the rebrand was led by Design Bridge and Partners, which built it around a single named concept. The new lion has a sharper mane and posture, the magazine said, and the update bolds Great Eastern’s longstanding serif lettering rather than replacing it.

Insurers, banks and their marks.

American financial brands tend to draw on a small set of visual ideas, and most of them are older than modern advertising. The first is the surname. Many firms in banking, insurance and investment carry the names of the people who started them, and a wordmark built from two family names reads as a signature, a promise that someone stands behind the account. Over time those names are often shortened to initials or a single word, and the letterforms are redrawn to look calm at small sizes on statements, cards and phone screens.

The second idea is the emblem. Eagles, shields, umbrellas and other protective shapes appear again and again because they are easy to read and suggest cover and steadiness without a word of copy. A plain box or square, filled with one strong colour, does similar work for firms that want to look restrained rather than heraldic.

The third idea belongs to advertising rather than the logo. Insurers in particular lean on recurring characters: animated mascots, invented animals and actors who return in campaign after campaign, so that a voice or a face becomes as recognisable as the mark itself. Together, names, emblems and familiar spokespeople give a set of abstract services something people can picture and remember.

One emblem across several businesses.

One aim of the 2025 work was to bring several businesses under one mark. Campaign Asia said the update introduced a unified visual system across Great Eastern Financial Advisers, Great Eastern Takaful and Great Eastern Cares, with the goal of harmonising the group’s business extensions under a single emblem. Keith Chia, head of group brand and marketing at Great Eastern, told the magazine that the agency had understood the need “to modernise” while staying true to values that had defined the company for over a century.

Charlie Lowe, chief strategy officer for Asia-Pacific at Design Bridge and Partners, said in the same report that the new visual system was meant to unify the brand across markets and modern customer touchpoints and to keep alive the company’s “Reach for Great” spirit. That line also appears across the insurer’s own websites, where the lion story is told under the heading “Honouring the past, shaping the future”.

The continuity is deliberate. Rather than drop the animal or the serif, each redraw the company describes has kept both and adjusted their stance: the crest of 1908, the roaring lion of 1910, the simplified lion of 1950, the minimal lion of 1970, the eastward lion of 2001 and the sharper lion of 2025. The OCBC line, added in 2004 and shortened in 2025, is the main element that has been added rather than redrawn; Marketech APAC said the revised tagline would be applied, with the new lion, progressively across the group’s businesses.

For a design guide, Great Eastern shows how a single animal, redrawn every few decades but never abandoned, can carry a brand through changes of ownership and market. Compare AIA, which opened a Singapore branch in 1933, and Prudential, another insurer whose emblem is a figure rather than a word. For this guide we use red, crest red and pale sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Great Eastern’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.