State Bank of India Brand Guidelines: Bank of Calcutta 1806, a 1971 Keyhole & SBI

Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, then one Imperial Bank.

The State Bank of India traces its origins to the Bank of Calcutta, established in Calcutta on 2 June 1806, according to the bank’s own history page. Three years later it received a charter and became the Bank of Bengal, on 2 January 1809, which the bank calls the first joint-stock bank of British India. The Bank of Bombay followed on 15 April 1840 and the Bank of Madras on 1 July 1843. The bank describes the three “presidency banks” plainly as largely Anglo-Indian creations, shaped by the needs of colonial finance and European trade in the three presidency towns.

For their first decades the three banks issued their own notes. The bank’s history says the Paper Currency Act of 1861 ended that right, with the government taking over paper currency from 1 March 1862, and handed the presidency banks the management of the new notes and government balances; branch networks then grew quickly. A Presidency Banks Act, in force from 1 May 1876, put the three under one statute.

On 27 January 1921 the three banks, with 70 branches between them, were merged into the Imperial Bank of India, which acted as a commercial bank, a bankers’ bank and banker to the government. The creation of the Reserve Bank of India in 1935 ended its near-central-bank role, the bank’s history says, and the Imperial Bank became a purely commercial bank that also acted as the Reserve Bank’s agent where the central bank had no office.

After independence, a rural credit survey committee recommended a state-partnered bank built on the Imperial Bank. Parliament passed an Act in May 1955, and the State Bank of India was constituted on 1 July 1955, inheriting 480 offices, according to the bank. English Wikipedia adds that the Reserve Bank of India took the controlling interest under the 1955 Act and that the Government of India acquired that stake in 2008. A 1959 Act let the new bank take over regional banks of former princely states as subsidiaries, later called associates; Hindi Wikipedia gives its name as भारतीय स्टेट बैंक, Bharatiya State Bank.

A banyan tree, then a keyhole.

The bank’s symbol is one of the more fully documented in Indian banking. The Hindu BusinessLine reported in June 2016 that in 1955 the new State Bank took a banyan tree in a round coin form as its logo. After fourteen banks were nationalised in 1969, the paper said, the bank wanted a new image, and some officials thought the banyan “inappropriate,” since nothing grows beneath that tree.

The bank commissioned the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. According to former NID faculty member Mahendra Patel, quoted by BusinessLine, a two-person team of Shekhar Kamath and Vikas Satvalekar, guided by Dashrath Patel, then head of the design department, did the work as a paid professional commission rather than a student project. The solid circle with a keyhole, read as a lock and key with the bank as custodian of savings, was Kamath’s idea, and the bank adopted it on 1 October 1971. Mahendra Patel drew matching lettering for the bank’s name in nine Indian languages, the paper said; English Wikipedia gives fourteen.

Other accounts add detail. The Economic Times reported in April 2017 that Kamath, writing online, had linked the shape to the tokens banks once issued to customers, and had kept it simple so that a manager in a remote branch could have it painted on a wall. In 2014 DeshGujarat quoted a senior SBI official as saying the inspiration was “apparently” Ahmedabad’s Kankaria lake.

The associate banks used the same keyhole as the parent bank, English Wikipedia says, which made the group look like one network long before it became one legal bank.

Indian banks and their public face.

Indian banks tend to present themselves through a short name and a bold symbol. The State Bank of India’s keyhole, drawn at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and adopted in 1971, replaced a banyan tree, The Hindu BusinessLine reported, and in 2017 the bank cut its long name to the letters SBI beside that symbol, The Economic Times reported. Across the sector, blues, reds and oranges are common in bank marks, usually pairing one symbol with a short wordmark.

Language is part of the identity. The keyhole came with matching lettering of the bank’s name in nine Indian languages, according to BusinessLine, and Indian bank signs and websites commonly set Hindi and English names side by side, with regional scripts added in different states. Names change too: UTI Bank became Axis Bank in 2007 because other organisations used the UTI name, Mint reported, and the merger of five associate banks into SBI on 1 April 2017 took their names off branch signboards, The Hindu reported.

Bank websites follow a common pattern. Pages on savings accounts, loans and cards sit beside digital banking apps, branch and cash-machine locators, and photographs of branches and staff. Financial inclusion has a long history in the sector’s self-presentation: BusinessLine dates its start to the nationalisation of fourteen banks in 1969, and government schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana appear in the State Bank of India’s website menus. The websites of both the State Bank of India and Axis Bank now sit at addresses ending in .bank.in.

Annual reports and corporate social responsibility programmes complete the picture, setting out branch networks, rural reach and foundation work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name and ownership changed, and what is documented about its symbol — and marks clearly what rests only on the bank’s own word.

One bank, one keyhole, three letters.

Consolidation came in steps. English Wikipedia records that the State Bank of Saurashtra merged into SBI in 2008 and the State Bank of Indore in 2010. The Hindu reported that on 1 April 2017 the remaining five associates — the State Banks of Bikaner and Jaipur, Hyderabad, Mysore, Patiala and Travancore — and the Bharatiya Mahila Bank became part of SBI; the bank said in a statement that the merger would place it among the top 50 banks in the world by assets.

The identity changed with the merger. The Economic Times reported on 5 April 2017 that the new logo dropped the long form “State Bank of India” and the tagline “The banker to every Indian,” keeping the blue keyhole followed by SBI. The bank had refreshed its blue and given the letter B some new detailing, and its marketing head told the paper the change was timed to coincide with the merger and was meant to declutter the mark on advertising and sponsorships.

Digital banking followed. Entrackr reported in November 2017 that the bank had launched YONO, short for “You Only Need One,” an app and web platform for banking and for selling cards, insurance and mutual funds. Today the bank’s website, now at an address ending in .bank.in, gives its core values as Service, Transparency, Ethics, Politeness and Sustainability, and calls SBI the largest banking and financial services organisation in India, with more than 23,000 branches; English Wikipedia also describes it as India’s largest bank by assets and deposits.

For a design guide, State Bank of India shows how a simple symbol, drawn so any branch could paint it, can carry a bank through mergers and a name cut to three letters. Compare SBI Life, the group’s insurance arm, and HDFC Bank, a private lender from 1994. For this guide we use a navy, a mid blue and a pale blue-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep State Bank of India’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.