Bancolombia Brand Guidelines: A Medellín Bank From 1875, Yellow Kept & Six Bright Tones

A Medellín bank founded in 1875.

Bancolombia traces its history to 29 January 1875, when the Banco de Colombia was founded in Medellín. The financial daily Portafolio, marking the bank’s 140th anniversary in January 2015, reported that the founding meeting took place in the house of Ramón del Corral, who became its first manager, and that the first board had 25 members. In 1924 the bank set up a trust section and opened branches in Barranquilla and Girardot, and in 1929 its shares were listed on the Bolsa de Bogotá, Portafolio reported; in 1973 it opened an office in Panama.

The bank also has a place in Colombia’s banking technology. In October 2025 the Medellín newspaper El Colombiano reported that in 1975 the then Banco de Colombia installed the country’s first cash machine, in the centre of Medellín, opening the way to round-the-clock access to accounts.

The 1980s brought upheaval. Both the English and Spanish Wikipedia articles say that in 1983, during the crisis of the Grupo Grancolombiano, the business group the bank then belonged to, the government nationalised Banco de Colombia, which operated as a state entity until 1994.

Today’s Bancolombia also comes from a second bank. The Banco Industrial Colombiano, or BIC, was founded in 1945, Spanish Wikipedia says, and Portafolio credits it with offering the first credit card service in Colombia and South America. In July 1995 the BIC listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which English Wikipedia describes as a first for a Colombian company. It bought Banco de Colombia in 1997, and in 1998 the combined bank formally took the name Bancolombia.

Mergers, a bee and a new look in 2021.

Growth continued by merger. In 2005 Bancolombia joined with the savings and housing lender Conavi and the financial corporation Corfinsura, forming what became Grupo Bancolombia. It expanded into Central America by buying Banco Agrícola of El Salvador in 2007 and HSBC’s Panamanian operations in 2013, renamed Banistmo, and, Portafolio reported, 40 per cent of Guatemala’s BAM the same year. In 2016 the group launched Nequi, a digital wallet that Spanish Wikipedia says began as an internal start-up.

Conavi’s old symbol still matters to the bank. Conavi was founded in 1974 as a savings and housing corporation, and a smiling cartoon bee was its emblem for more than 30 years, El Heraldo reported in October 2025, when Bancolombia announced a limited Christmas edition of 300,000 debit cards carrying the bee, available in branches from 1 December.

The present identity dates from April 2021, when Bancolombia and the other companies of the group took on a shared corporate image. In an interview published by the Colombian marketing magazine P&M on 21 April 2021, the bank’s marketing head said the project had taken more than two years of planning. Black and white, she said, stood for simplicity and transparency on one side and depth and solidity on the other; they were joined by six vibrant tones, keeping yellow as the bank’s colour of trust and adding five more to stand for the variety of people’s ideals, emotions and moments of life. The central idea, P&M wrote, was to represent diversity among both customers and employees.

The change went beyond colour. The bank built new audio branding, a typeface meant to be easier to read and to adapt to digital platforms, and a more local, cheerful style of photography, according to the same interview. P&M named the design studio Vasava, the brand-strategy agency Comuniza and the creative agency Sancho BBDO as the firms involved, and said the new image would replace old material gradually as stock ran out. Spanish Wikipedia lists the bank’s recent slogans, including “Desde el corazón” (From the heart), used from 2023 to 2025.

Banks of Latin America.

Latin American banks tend to present themselves through a few strong signals rather than many small ones. A bold wordmark or a simple symbol, set in one dominant colour, does most of the work: reds, blues, oranges and yellows recur across the region, sometimes chosen to echo a national flag, as English Wikipedia says of Banco do Brasil’s blue and yellow. Some banks go further and commission their own typefaces, as Bradesco did with Bradesco Sans in 2020, according to the Brazilian site B9.

The copy is written in Spanish or Portuguese first, and the photography is local: branches, city streets, customers at work and families at home. Product pages are built around the same practical headings almost everywhere — accounts, cards, credit, insurance and the bank’s own digital apps.

Banks in the region also present a public side that goes beyond banking products. Financial-inclusion programmes, foundations and cultural institutes appear alongside the commercial pages; Fundação Bradesco has worked in education since 1956, and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil runs cultural centres in several Brazilian cities. Sport sponsorship, from national teams to motor racing, carries the colours further still.

Many of these banks are listed companies, so annual and integrated reports are part of the identity too, setting out history, ownership and governance in a consistent house style. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it and how it presents itself — and treats its palette as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

A new parent and a smaller map.

The group’s structure has changed again. Spanish Wikipedia says that in 2025 Bancolombia announced the creation of Grupo Cibest, as part of a reorganisation, to replace Grupo Bancolombia as its parent, and in August 2026 the Rio Times, a Latin American business news site, described Grupo Cibest as the Medellín-based parent of Bancolombia. On 30 June 2026 Grupo Cibest completed the sale of all of Banistmo’s shares to Banco La Hipotecaria, a subsidiary of Inversiones Cuscatlán, according to a company announcement published on 11 August 2026. On 3 August 2026 it closed the purchase of the payroll-lending fintech Avista Colombia, which keeps its own name and management, the Rio Times reported.

Spanish Wikipedia says that from 2021 Bancolombia shared its corporate identity with Banistmo, Banco Agrícola and Banco Agromercantil de Guatemala, the bank known as BAM; Banistmo left the group with the 2026 sale. The same article says Bancolombia has been the official bank of Colombia’s national football team since 2015, and lists among the group’s businesses Nequi, the online payments service Wompi, Sufi and Leasing Bancolombia.

For a design guide, Bancolombia shows how a bank founded in 1875 can keep one inherited colour, yellow, and widen it with black, white and a set of bright tones so that several companies in several countries read as one family. Compare Grupo Aval, another Colombian banking group, and BCP, the Peruvian bank at the heart of Credicorp. For this guide we use a warm yellow, near-black and off-white with a coral and a teal, with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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