Housing Bank Brand Guidelines: Amman 1973, a 1997 Commercial Bank & a Stepped Tower

A housing lender that became a commercial bank.

The bank that Jordanians know in Arabic as Bank al-Iskan, literally the housing bank, was founded in 1973. Arabic Wikipedia describes The Housing Bank for Trade and Finance as a Jordanian public shareholding company set up that year, and counts it among the larger banks in the country. Its English trading name is simply Housing Bank, which is how Jordan’s state news agency Petra referred to it in a business report in July 2026.

The original remit sat in the name: lending for homes. Arabic Wikipedia says that after 24 years of operation the bank entered a new stage in 1997, when it became a full commercial bank, with its capital raised several times in the years that followed. The full legal name joins the two halves of that history: “Housing” for the founding purpose and “Trade and Finance” for the commercial bank it became.

The network grew with that shift. Arabic Wikipedia describes branches across the regions of Jordan, branches in Palestine and Bahrain, and sister banks and companies elsewhere, naming the International Bank for Trade and Finance in Syria and a Housing Bank for Trade and Finance in Algeria. The same article lists the King Abdullah II Award for Excellence for 2000, an Arab quality award in 2001 and an award at a Jordanian e-government conference in 2002. The branch and ATM counts it gives date from the mid-2000s, so they are not repeated here.

The name itself is bilingual by habit. In Arabic the bank is Bank al-Iskan lil-Tijara wal-Tamweel; in English it is The Housing Bank for Trade and Finance, often shortened to Housing Bank, and English Wikipedia uses the initials HBTF for it.

A stepped tower in Shmeisani.

The most visible piece of Housing Bank design is a building. The Housing Bank complex (in Arabic, Mujamma Bank al-Iskan) stands in the Shmeisani district of Amman, a short walk from the Interior Ministry roundabout. Arabic Wikipedia dates the project to 1982 and its official opening to 1984, when King Hussein opened it, and credits construction to the Korean firm SsangYong, with project management and consulting by Dar Al-Handasah. English Wikipedia gives the tower a height of about 98 metres and calls it a popular Amman landmark.

Its form is the point. Each floor is smaller than the one below, so the building rises in a stepped, pyramid-like profile; Arabic Wikipedia says the shape was inspired by the hills of Amman. In its first decades the lower three floors held shops, cinemas and restaurants, and the upper floors held company offices, which made the complex one of the city’s busier public places in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2008 the shopping floors were converted to offices, and in 2010, Arabic Wikipedia says, an Arab Libyan company took a 90 per cent share of the complex while the bank kept the remaining tenth.

The building also carries the bank’s name into the city’s vocabulary. Both Wikipedia articles use the bank’s name for the tower itself, in Arabic as the Housing Bank complex and in English as the Al-Iskan Bank Building, and English Wikipedia notes that the tower contains offices belonging to the bank. Arabic Wikipedia also records that Royal Jordanian once occupied eight floors as its management offices before moving to a building of its own.

How banks in the region present themselves.

Banks across North Africa and the Levant often present themselves in more than one language at once. A single bank may carry an Arabic name, a French or English name and a set of initials, and use each in a different setting: Morocco’s Banque Populaire, for example, is also known as Chaabi and as BCP Group, while BMCE kept its initials as a byline after taking the name Bank of Africa in 2020. Websites in the region commonly offer Arabic, French and English versions side by side.

Colour does much of the work in these identities. Wordmarks in the region are frequently set in greens, blues and reds, and some banks explain their choices: Bank of Africa says its dark blue stands for the institution and its turquoise for modernity. The palettes in this guide are our own unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ specifications.

Product ranges tend to sit side by side. Many banks run Islamic or participative banking windows or subsidiaries beside their conventional ranges, as Bank of Africa does through Bank Al Karam, and their websites usually give separate pages to current accounts, cards, mobile apps and remittances, with sections aimed at nationals living abroad. Branch photography, city skylines and head-office towers are common on home pages and in reports.

Annual and sustainability reports are a large part of how these banks speak to investors, and several groups are listed on their national stock exchanges. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it, how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the bank’s own word.

Shareholders, bonds and sponsorships.

Housing Bank is a listed company with a large Gulf shareholder. English Wikipedia’s article on QNB Group, the Qatari bank, lists the Housing Bank for Trade and Finance among its holdings in Jordan, alongside its other regional stakes. That link makes QNB the closest relative of the brand among the banks in this series.

Recent coverage shows how the bank now presents itself. On 8 July 2026, Petra reported that Housing Bank had launched what the agency called Jordan’s first blue bond, issued under a programme with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with the proceeds directed to water projects, chiefly the National Water Carrier Project. The same report said the bank had led the arrangement of a local syndicated loan for that project in 2025, and described the water carrier as the largest water infrastructure project in Jordan’s modern history, planned to bring drinking water to Aqaba and Amman. In November 2026 Jordan News reported that the bank was the exclusive sponsor of Qimam 13, a leadership and mentoring programme for women in the public sector run by the International Women’s Forum – Jordan with the Jordanian Academy for Government Administration.

The Petra report quoted the bank’s chief executive describing the blue bond as an instrument for water-resource management and sustainable infrastructure, and an EBRD managing director calling it a landmark transaction for Jordan. The Arabic name, al-Iskan, keeps the housing origin in view even as the business has broadened into a full commercial bank with branches beyond Jordan.

For a design guide, Housing Bank shows how a Jordanian bank can carry a 1973 founding purpose, a bilingual name and a landmark building into a modern retail brand; compare it with the Lebanese group Bank Audi and with Qatar’s QNB. For this guide we use a cedar teal, limestone and desert ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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