CITIC Securities Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Broker, A+H Listings in 2003 & 2011 and CLSA

A securities arm for one of China’s oldest conglomerates.

CITIC Securities was founded in October 1995, the company says, as the securities business of CITIC Group, the Chinese state-owned conglomerate. English Wikipedia also gives 1995. The company names its largest shareholder as CITIC Financial Holdings, and its website carries a CITIC Group copyright line.

The firm has two main homes. English Wikipedia places its headquarters in the CITIC Securities Tower in Futian, Shenzhen; Chinese Wikipedia gives Shenzhen as its registered seat and a CITIC Securities Tower in Chaoyang, Beijing, as its main office, and the company’s own list of offices starts with Beijing.

Its shares trade in two markets. English Wikipedia says the A shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 6 January 2003 and the H shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 6 October 2011. The company describes itself as the first Chinese securities firm with both A-share and H-share listings; that is its own claim.

The early years included a large domestic deal. Chinese Wikipedia says that in 2005 CITIC Securities and the state investor Jianyin took over the broker Huaxia Securities and formed two new companies, one of them China Securities, which CITIC Securities controlled at first and largely sold in 2010. Chinese Wikipedia also lists the company as a member of the SSE 50 index of large Shanghai-listed shares.

A full-service investment bank.

CITIC Securities calls itself a full-licence financial services group, working across securities, funds, futures, foreign exchange and commodities. Its website lists investment banking, wealth management, asset management, fixed income, equity derivatives, securities finance, equity sales and trading, research and custody as separate businesses, serving companies, institutions, wealthy clients and retail investors. In the company’s descriptions, investment banking covers equity and debt financing and mergers at home and abroad; wealth management offers broking, investment advice, margin financing and stock options through a national branch network; and asset management runs money, bond, equity and alternative products for clients including the national social security fund, banks, annuity plans and insurers.

Several of its subsidiaries carry their own names. The company lists China Asset Management (Huaxia Fund), CITIC Futures, CITIC Goldstone, its private equity arm, and CITIC Securities Asset Management among its main controlled companies. English Wikipedia says CITIC Futures was founded in 1993, is wholly owned, and holds memberships of the main Chinese futures exchanges, including those in Shanghai, Dalian and Zhengzhou. The company says it has more than 400 branches and outlets inside China and operations in 13 countries, from Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore to London, Amsterdam and New York.

Its brand abroad comes largely from CLSA, the Hong Kong broker founded in 1986. English Wikipedia says CITIC Securities agreed in July 2012 to buy CLSA from the French bank Crédit Agricole in two steps, starting with a 19.9 percent stake; it bought the remaining 80.1 percent on 31 July 2013, making CLSA wholly owned. The Bangkok Post reported in April 2018 that CITIC Securities then merged its Hong Kong investment-banking work with CLSA, and that by November 2016 the overseas businesses of CLSA and CITIC Securities International had been combined under one brand. CLSA’s website now carries the name CITIC CLSA in its title.

The same Bangkok Post article said International Financing Review Asia had named CITIC Securities its Asian Bank of the Year for 2017. Chinese Wikipedia adds that in 2014 CLSA took a stake in the American broker BTIG, and that in May 2015 CITIC Securities International and CLSA set up CITIC CLSA Securities to run their Asian corporate finance and capital markets work together.

How the category presents itself.

China’s large insurers and securities firms are mostly listed groups with sizeable state shareholders, and many trade in more than one market, typically Shanghai or Shenzhen alongside Hong Kong, and in a few cases London. Their brands therefore have to work in at least two scripts. A full Chinese company name usually sits beside a shorter Chinese form and a set of English initials, as with PICC and 人保, or CPIC and 太保, and designers need all three versions to stay recognisable together.

The visual language this guide looks at includes wordmarks in reds, blues and golds, lettering with roots in Chinese calligraphy, and square, seal-like symbols that echo a traditional name chop. Websites and reports commonly pair those marks with photography of office towers and city skylines, and with images of the people and places the companies serve.

The products shape the pages. Insurers organise their sites around life, property, health and pension cover, policy and claims services and branch finders, while securities firms present brokerage, investment banking, asset management and the wealth apps through which retail investors trade. Group sites often link out to separate websites for each subsidiary, each carrying the parent’s initials.

Much of the most carefully designed material is financial reporting. Annual and interim reports, results presentations and ESG or sustainability reports are published in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English for investors on several exchanges, and they set the tone that the rest of a brand often follows. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and where it is listed — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A group name carried across many businesses.

For a designer, the interesting problem is scale. A securities firm inside a large conglomerate has to look like part of the family on a shared tower sign, yet stand on its own in a trading app, a research report and an investor presentation. CITIC Securities handles this by keeping the group name first and adding a plain descriptor after it, so the parent and the business read in one line.

The company states its goal in both Chinese and English. In English it reads: “To become a leading domestic and internationally renowned Chinese investment bank, trusted by clients around the world.” The line appears at the top of its English website, next to a list of honours and a menu that sets CLSA, China Asset Management, CITIC Goldstone and CITIC Futures alongside the parent’s own businesses.

That arrangement is the brand’s main design fact. CITIC Securities works as a house of names: the CITIC name on the parent and on several subsidiaries, an older Hong Kong name in CITIC CLSA, and a separate fund brand in China Asset Management. Its website pairs the Chinese name with the English “CITIC Securities,” and lists its customer service number in the header.

For a design guide, CITIC Securities shows how a parent group’s name can travel across a brokerage, a fund house and an overseas broker while each keeps a voice of its own. Compare CICC, another Chinese investment bank, and Huatai Securities, another Chinese broker. For this guide we use a lacquer red, a near-black and brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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