Julius Baer Brand Guidelines: A Zurich Exchange Office of 1890 Turned Private Bank

An exchange office in Zurich, and the partner who gave it his name.

Julius Baer traces its start to 1890, when Ludwig Hirschhorn and Theodor Grob opened an exchange office in Zurich, according to English Wikipedia. Grob left in 1896, and Julius Bär and Joseph Michael Uhl joined. German Wikipedia says Bär, born Isaac Bär in Heidelsheim in Baden, trained at the Augsburg bank August Gerstle and was a partner of the Basel private bank Samuel Dukas & Co. from 1886 to 1896, before he became a partner in Hirschhorn, Uhl & Bär at the end of that year. In 1901 he took the business over as Julius Bär & Co., and his name has stayed on the door ever since.

The bank remained a family partnership for most of the twentieth century. English Wikipedia lists his sons, and later his grandsons and great-grandsons, among its partners and board members, and German Wikipedia notes that Bär himself sat on the boards of the Thunerseebahn, the Südostbahn and the engineering firm Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon. The sources used for this guide do not say how the bank conducted its business between 1933 and 1945.

Change came in stages. The partnership became a company on 27 November 1974, English Wikipedia says, and from 1980 the bank accepted investors from outside the family, with its shares going public that year. Staff grew from about 400 in 1980 to more than 2,000 in 2000, by the same account. In 2005 the Bär families gave up control, and the share capital became a single class of registered shares quoted on the SIX Swiss Exchange, where the group trades today as Julius Bär Gruppe AG.

Three private banks, an asset manager and a wider map.

The decisive deal came in September 2005. Julius Baer bought three private banks, Ferrier Lullin, Ehinger & Armand von Ernst and Banco di Lugano, together with the asset manager GAM, from UBS, English Wikipedia says. UBS took almost a fifth of Julius Baer’s shares as part of the deal and sold that stake in May 2007. In October 2009 GAM was demerged as a separate company, leaving Julius Baer focused on wealth management.

Growth then came from abroad. In August 2012 the bank acquired Merrill Lynch’s international wealth management business outside the United States from Bank of America; in November 2012 it agreed a cooperation with the Milan firm Kairos, under which Julius Baer took a 19.9 per cent stake in Kairos and its Italian wealth management ran as Kairos Julius Baer; and in July 2014 it announced the purchase of the private banking assets of Israel’s Bank Leumi, according to English Wikipedia. Since the series began in 2014 it has been title sponsor of the FIA Formula E championship, by the same account. A charitable foundation, set up in 1965 by a member of the family, now concentrates on young people, vocational training, recycling and wealth inequality.

Legal matters are part of the record. On 4 February 2016 the bank signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice over undeclared accounts held by American clients, swissinfo.ch reported the next day; the Justice Department said the conduct ran from at least the 1990s to 2009, and under the agreement the bank was not prosecuted. In February 2020 the Swiss regulator FINMA found that the bank had fallen short in combating money laundering between 2009 and 2018, in cases linked to FIFA and the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, and ordered measures; FINMA lifted a resulting restriction on large acquisitions in March 2021, and a separate FIFA-related agreement with the Justice Department was concluded in May 2021, English Wikipedia says.

How private banks present themselves.

Private banks and wealth managers sell trust, continuity and discretion rather than a product on a shelf, and their identities tend to say so quietly. Many lead with a founder’s surname or a family name set as a restrained serif wordmark, sometimes paired with a crest, a heraldic animal or a founding year. Pictet, for example, says its lion comes from a seventeenth-century family coat of arms and has carried the year 1805 beneath it since 1974.

Colour usually follows the same register. Deep green, navy, burgundy and dark brown are common choices across the sector, often set against cream, stone or white, with a muted gold or brass as an accent. The effect is closer to a bound annual report or a club library than to a retail bank, and bright, saturated colours are rare.

Imagery leans on history and people. Websites and printed material often show portraits of founders and partners, historic premises and archive photographs, alongside heritage timelines that count the generations or the years since the founding. Partnerships and family-controlled houses in particular use their age and ownership structure as part of the message, explaining how decisions are taken and who is responsible.

The content itself is advisory. Typical pages cover wealth planning and succession, family offices, investment views and house research, market commentary, sustainable investing and philanthropy services, often with long-form articles and reports rather than short promotional copy. For designers, the sector is a study in restraint: generous white space, careful typography and a narrow palette do much of the work that louder brands leave to slogans.

A founder’s surname in two spellings.

The bank’s public face is its founder’s name. The group writes it Julius Baer in English and Julius Bär in German, and both forms appear in its legal names, Julius Baer Group Ltd. and Julius Bär Gruppe AG. Its colours and typefaces are not described in the sources used here, so the palette below is our own reading of the private-bank register rather than a copy of its identity.

Today the group is headquartered in Zurich and, by English Wikipedia’s count, operates in 28 countries with more than 7,500 staff; in 2016 swissinfo.ch called it Switzerland’s third-largest listed bank. Its leadership has changed recently: in 2025, English Wikipedia says, it appointed a new chairman, effective in May, and announced a smaller executive board and job cuts, after losses linked to the collapse of the Signa property group. Through these changes the name on the door has stayed the same since 1901, and the bank still presents itself under the founder’s surname rather than a set of initials.

For a design guide, Julius Baer shows how a founder’s surname, written in two spellings, can carry a bank through the change from family partnership to listed group. Compare UBS, the seller in its 2005 deal, and Pictet, a Geneva house that stayed a partnership. For this guide we use a deep navy, slate and warm stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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