Commercial Bank of Ceylon Brand Guidelines: A 1920 Lineage, Blue With Green & Al Adalah

A Colombo bank with a Galle Fort branch.

Commercial Bank of Ceylon — ComBank, in its own short form — is a Colombo bank whose story runs back more than a century. The Island reported in December 2020 that the reopening of its restored Galle Fort branch was “one of the last events of the Bank’s 100th year,” which places its origins in 1920. It now trades as Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC, and in August 2026 Fitch Ratings described it as Sri Lanka’s third-largest commercial bank, in a rating statement carried by EconomyNext.

The Galle building holds part of that history. According to The Island, the early-19th-century house inside Galle Fort was once a hotel called the Old Mansion and later the Galle branch of the Mercantile Bank of India; Commercial Bank came into possession of it in 1973, when it acquired three of that bank’s branches. The 2020 restoration was carried out in consultation with the Galle Heritage Foundation and the Department of Archaeology, the paper said, keeping the old structure wherever possible.

The bank’s head office is Commercial House, in Colombo 1. In April 2025 it turned the branch there long known as the “Foreign Branch” into a “Corporate Branch” for corporate and trade customers, The Island reported, and the bank presented the change as a nod to Colombo’s long history as a trading hub.

Bangladesh, Al Adalah and a carbon goal.

Commercial Bank also works outside Sri Lanka. It entered Bangladesh in 2003 by acquiring the local operations of Crédit Agricole Indosuez — its first overseas acquisition — and ran 20 outlets there by late 2025, The Island reported; a sponsored EconomyNext feature in August 2026 gave the figure as 21 branches. In September 2015 EconomyNext reported the bank’s plan to set up a unit in the Maldives with a local business group, with Commercial Bank holding 55 percent. The bank says it also runs microfinance operations in Myanmar and an office in the Dubai International Financial Centre.

At home it sells Islamic banking under a sub-brand of its own, Al Adalah. In November 2025 it opened Al Adalah counters at its Dehiwala and Galle Fort branches, its fourth and fifth such units after counters at its City Office in Colombo, on Main Street in Pettah and at Kattankudy, The Island reported, with staff trained in Islamic banking. Trade finance is sold under the name ComBank TradeLink, according to the bank’s sponsored feature, which also describes it as the country’s largest lender to small and medium-sized businesses — a claim the bank makes for itself.

Sustainability has become its main public theme. In April 2021 The Island reported that Commercial Bank had become the first Sri Lankan bank to achieve carbon neutrality across its whole operation — 268 branches and its head office — a goal it had set for its centenary year, with the status verified by Climate Smart Initiatives under the ISO 14064 standard. The bank’s own account dates its green financing to 2000, followed by a green financing strategy in 2017 and a green financing taxonomy in 2018.

Design and documentation.

Banks in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka present themselves to customers who may read in more than one script. A bank’s name can appear in English on one line and in Urdu, Bengali or Sinhala on another, on branch signs, cards, forms and apps. Short initials such as HBL or MCB travel well across those scripts, and several of the banks in this group have turned long founding names into letters that work on a cash machine, a cricket broadcast or a phone screen.

Colour does a lot of the work. Green, red and blue wordmarks are common across the region’s banking signage, and each colour has to hold up in strong sunlight on a shopfront, at small sizes in a mobile app and in print on a passbook or statement. The palettes in these guides are our own interpretations, chosen to show how a dark accent and a pale ground can carry a name in all of those places.

The product range shapes the website as much as the logo does. Islamic-banking and conventional ranges often sit side by side: MCB Bank, for example, runs its Islamic business through a separate subsidiary, MCB Islamic Bank, with its own product names and its own app. Pages on savings accounts, remittances from workers abroad, mobile wallets and lending to small and medium-sized businesses appear next to branch-locator maps and photographs of branch interiors and staff.

Formal documents complete the picture. Listed banks publish annual reports, and some also issue sustainability reports, with the same typefaces, colours and photography carried into long financial tables. For a designer, the useful lesson from this category is consistency across scripts, channels and formats, from a stadium board to a page of notes to the accounts.

Blue, with a green element.

The bank’s mark changed at the start of 2024. The Island reported in January 2024 that “the instantly-recognisable Commercial Bank logo in blue” would “hereafter also feature a green element,” which the bank said stood for its commitment to sustainability, from good governance and inclusion to eco-friendly banking. The bank called itself the first organisation in Sri Lanka to state that commitment in its corporate identity, and relaunched its website with the new logo at the same time.

The parent name now reaches its subsidiaries too. In January 2021 The Island reported that the finance company the bank had acquired in 2014, previously known as Serendib Finance and before that Indra Finance, would trade as CBC Finance under a new name and a new corporate logo from 30 December 2020, so that it could be identified at once with its parent. Payments carry the brand into phones: in February 2026 The Island reported that Commercial Bank had become the first bank in Sri Lanka to enable Google Pay for its Mastercard debit and credit cardholders, working with Mastercard and Google.

Brand rankings have followed. In August 2025 The Island reported that Brand Finance had ranked Commercial Bank the second most valuable brand in Sri Lanka across all sectors and the most valuable private-sector bank brand, with a AAA brand-strength rating. In a sponsored EconomyNext interview the same month, the bank’s managers described a push toward younger customers through Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, a trilingual digital service, and a brand that, in their words, should be “both a symbol of stability and a futuristic financial partner.” The bank also says it was the first local bank listed in The Banker’s Top 1000 World Banks.

For a design guide, Commercial Bank of Ceylon shows how a century-old bank can add one colour to an established mark to carry a new message. Compare HNB, another Colombo private bank, one that traces itself to 1888, and BRAC Bank, a Dhaka bank in a market where Commercial Bank has operated since 2003. For this guide we use a deep blue and a leaf green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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