Hong Leong Bank Brand Guidelines: A 1905 Kuching Remittance House Turned HLB

Pepper, rubber and remittances in Sarawak.

Hong Leong Bank traces its roots not to Kuala Lumpur but to Kuching, in Sarawak. The bank’s own history says it was first incorporated there in 1905 as the Kwong Lee Mortgage and Remittance Company, and English Wikipedia names its founders as the Cantonese brothers Lam Tee Chew and Lam Song Khee. The firm lent against export commodities such as pepper and rubber, and sent the remittances of overseas Chinese home to their families in southern China, Wikipedia says.

Branches followed in Sibu in 1923 and in Singapore in 1926, and on 26 October 1934 the business became a public company, Kwong Lee Bank; a branch in Sarikei opened in 1937. Wikipedia records only that the Second World War brought a temporary disruption to the currency and banking system. The sources used for this guide do not say how Kwong Lee Bank operated during the occupation of 1941–1945.

After the war the bank expanded. In 1964 OCBC of Singapore bought a 52% majority stake from the Lam family, according to Wikipedia. Kwong Lee opened its first Kuala Lumpur branch in May 1978 and moved its head office from Kuching to the capital on 1 January 1982. In May 1982 the MUI Group acquired the bank, which was renamed Malayan United Bank on 2 February 1983 and MUI Bank in 1989; under that name it grew from 11 to 35 branches, the bank says.

The Hong Leong name, and a regional map.

The present name arrived on 3 January 1994, when the Hong Leong Group of Malaysia bought MUI Bank through Hong Leong Credit, now Hong Leong Financial Group, and renamed it Hong Leong Bank Berhad. The bank listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange on 17 October 1994. It also records a merger with Wah Tat Bank completed on 1 January 2001 and the absorption of EON Bank, which Hong Leong Bank announced as complete on 6 May 2011, Wikipedia says. Wikipedia also notes that the name is stylised “HongLeong Bank” and that the bank is separate from Singapore’s Hong Leong Group and Hong Leong Finance, which use a similar name.

Today Hong Leong Bank is listed on Bursa Malaysia, has its headquarters at Menara Hong Leong in Damansara City, Kuala Lumpur, and describes itself as a regional financial services company with a presence in Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia and China. It says it was the first Malaysian bank to enter the Chinese banking sector, taking an 18% stake in Bank of Chengdu in 2008, and that its wholly owned Vietnamese bank began operating in October 2009, with branches in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi; its Cambodian bank followed in 2013. At home, Wikipedia says, its personal banking spans property, auto and personal loans, payment products, share financing, investment, insurance, deposits and remittance, while Hong Leong Islamic Bank launched a digital restricted investment account, the Portfolio Investment Account (PIA-i), for Shariah-compliant unit trust funds.

The bank’s stated ethos is “Digital at the Core,” with the aim that customers can live life “uninterrupted.” Its HLB Connect app carries much of that promise. On 27 October 2026 the national news agency Bernama reported that HLB Connect users could make QR payments at UnionPay and Weixin Pay merchants across China, following a partnership with UnionPay International, with the service also available at participating merchants in Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand.

How Malaysian and Vietnamese banks present themselves.

Banks in Malaysia and Vietnam tend to present themselves through a bold wordmark or a short set of initials, often set in a single strong colour. Red, green, blue and orange recur across the sector, and many names work in two languages at once: a Malay or Vietnamese name for home customers and an English form or abbreviation for markets, filings and overseas branches. Several of the banks in this guide are known chiefly by initials that began as the names of older holding companies or merged institutions.

In Malaysia, Islamic banking usually sits beside the conventional bank as a range of its own, often run through a separate subsidiary with Shariah-compliant deposits, financing and cards. Public Bank, for example, says it began Islamic banking in 1993 and moved that business into Public Islamic Bank in 2008, while RHB offers its Islamic products through RHB Islamic Bank. RHB’s Sinar Credit Card-i, launched in November 2026, shows the “-i” suffix some Malaysian banks use for Islamic products.

Bank websites in both countries are organised around everyday tasks: deposits and savings accounts, home and vehicle loans, cards, QR payments and mobile apps. In Malaysia the national QR standard, DuitNow QR, was launched by PayNet in July 2019, according to Public Bank, whose own site lists DuitNow QR and its MyPB app under mobile banking. Photography tends to show branches, city skylines, head-office towers and customers at counters or on phones rather than abstract imagery.

Much of how these banks describe themselves appears in formal documents. Listed banks publish annual reports and, increasingly, sustainability reports, and their corporate websites group these with investor pages, milestone timelines and anniversary campaigns. This guide draws on those pages, on encyclopedia entries and on dated press reports, and marks where a fact rests on a bank’s own word.

A family of sub-brands under one set of initials.

In recent years the bank has gathered its sub-brands around the initials HLB. In October 2025 Marketing-Interactive reported that HLB Private Bank had unveiled a new logo and visual identity, designed to keep its ties to the parent brand, rolled out across its private banking offices in Malaysia and Singapore and introduced with a brand film shown on Malaysia Airlines flights; the relaunch followed an alliance with the Swiss private bank Lombard Odier. In February 2026 Fintech News Malaysia reported that the wealth segment had become HLB Priority, with a refreshed identity extending to stationery and staff uniforms and Priority Centres upgraded nationwide through March 2026.

The Islamic arm followed. In December 2025 Hong Leong Islamic Bank marked its 20th anniversary with the proposition “Timeless principles guiding tomorrow’s wealth,” and in March 2026 Hong Leong Islamic Bank was formally renamed HLB Islamic, with a “Hayat @ HLB Islamic” proposition built on five pillars of wealth stewardship and zakat, sadaqah and waqf services inside the HLB Connect app; the bank presented the change as bringing its Islamic identity closer to the core HLB brand, Marketing-Interactive reported.

Its advertising leans on stories of long-lived family businesses. For Chinese New Year 2024 the bank released “Wealth of a lasting legacy,” a film about the Sin Eng Hoe biscuit makers that closed on the line “As your legacy prospers across generations, we’re here for you,” Marketing-Interactive reported in February 2024.

For a design guide, Hong Leong Bank shows how a 1905 remittance house can carry a modern, initial-led system of sub-brands. Compare Maybank, another Malaysian banking group, and OCBC, which once held a majority of Kwong Lee Bank. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear river blue and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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