Jusan Bank Brand Guidelines: Tsesnabank, a 2019 Rename & Alatau City Bank Since 2025

A farm lender from Tselinograd.

Jusan Bank no longer trades under that name. On 16 June 2025 the bank completed its re-registration as Alatau City Bank, the Kazakh business newspaper Kursiv reported that day; the paper said the change had first been made public on 28 May and that both names would appear in some services and materials for a while. The legal company is the same one that was called Tsesnabank until 2019 and Jusan Bank after that, AIRPress noted in an October 2026 history of the bank.

The story begins in 1992. Tsesnabank was registered on 17 January 1992, Forbes Kazakhstan reported in 2019, and AIRPress says it was founded in Tselinograd, the city now called Astana, as part of the Tsesna group of companies, with lending to farms in the northern regions at the core of its business. Russian Wikipedia records its growth in the 2000s, including branches opened in Almaty, Taraz and Kyzylorda in June 2007 and an insurance subsidiary, Tsesna Garant, registered in February 2010. Today the bank’s head office is in Almaty.

In 2018 the bank went through a difficult period. AIRPress records that clients began withdrawing funds in August 2018, that the bank borrowed from the National Bank of Kazakhstan, and that on 19 September 2018 the finance ministry, the National Bank, the bank and state development institutions signed a framework agreement on its recovery, under which a state fund for problem loans bought its portfolio of agricultural loans. In January 2019 the terms of its bonds were changed and S&P Global Ratings rated it “SD,” or selective default, the same source says.

A new owner followed. On 6 February 2019 the investment company First Heartland Securities announced it had bought 99.5% of Tsesnabank’s common shares under a framework agreement approved by the government and the National Bank, Forbes Kazakhstan reported, with a commitment to recapitalise the bank once conditions were met; AIRPress says the recapitalisation came the next day and the National Bank loan was repaid in full.

A steppe plant as a bank name.

The new name came that spring. At an extraordinary meeting on 22 April 2019, shareholders voted to rename Tsesnabank First Heartland Jýsan Bank, the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange announced on 29 April. Forbes Kazakhstan reported that the change was registered on Friday 26 April and covered the brand as well as the legal name. From 29 April the old website sent visitors to the new brand, Jýsan Bank, written in Cyrillic as Жусан Банк, and the bank said outdoor signs, products and other materials would carry the new name and logo in stages through 2019, without customers needing to reissue cards or re-sign contracts.

The word comes from the steppe. Жусан is the Kazakh name for Artemisia, the wormwood genus, of which 81 species grow across Kazakhstan’s deserts, semi-desert steppes and mountains, according to Kazakh Wikipedia. Later the bank wrote the name as plain Jusan; its mobile app and its service for companies were branded Jusan and Jusan Business, Russian Wikipedia says.

The bank grew by merger. In September 2019 it joined with First Heartland Bank, formerly Bank ExpoCredit, and in December 2020 it bought ATFBank, which was merged into Jusan Bank in September 2021, according to AIRPress. Russian Wikipedia dates the ATFBank purchase to 30 December 2020.

The brand also became a publisher. In October 2022 Jusan launched Ösim, an online magazine about starting and running a business in Kazakhstan, with its own editorial team, Russian Wikipedia says; the magazine still appears in the menus of the renamed bank’s website. Another brand project recorded there is Jusan Vibe, a space for exhibitions, lectures and meetings presented in Almaty in February 2023.

Ownership changed more than once. In 2020 the holding company passed to a UK-registered company, Jusan Technologies; Kursiv reported in February 2026 that the transfer led to a series of court cases, which ended in June 2023, when the bank and its subsidiaries were returned to Kazakh jurisdiction and control passed to a Kazakh businessman.

Design and documentation.

Many banks in Central Asia and the Caucasus now present themselves through their apps. In Kazakhstan, Kaspi.kz describes a single “Super App” that joins bill payments, an online marketplace, consumer credit, transfers and QR payments in shops, while Halyk Bank, the former state savings bank, sells its retail services through the Halyk SuperApp and its business services through Onlinebank. In the apps these two banks describe, loans, deposits, cards and transfers sit beside shopping, travel and government services.

Names are usually shown in more than one language and script. Halyk Bank’s full name appears in Kazakh as Қазақстан Халық Банкі, in Russian as Народный банк Казахстана and in English as Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan; Kaspi Bank was registered for years under the Russian name Банк Каспийский before it took its Latin-letter brand in 2008. Across the region, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani names may appear beside Latin and Cyrillic forms, so a wordmark has to work in several alphabets at once.

Many of these banks now operate across borders. Halyk Group runs subsidiaries in Georgia and Uzbekistan, and Kaspi.kz has bought classified-advert sites in Azerbaijan and businesses in Turkey. Halyk’s website lists loans, deposits, cards and transfers, and both groups, as listed companies, publish investor-relations sections with financial results for shareholders.

Colour and type vary from bank to bank. The palettes in this series of guides — reds, greens, blues and teals among them — are our own unofficial interpretations, set beside a Google Fonts stand-in for each brand. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name changed, who owns it and how it presents its services — and keeps figures such as customer numbers to a minimum, attributed to the source and date that gave them.

A new name for a new city.

The 2025 change followed a sale. AIRPress says the financial regulator approved a new major shareholder on 30 May 2025 and that the deal closed on 11 July 2025, leaving a co-founder of Kaspi.kz as the bank’s sole owner. Kursiv reported in February 2026 that the purchase had been completed in July 2025 through control of First Heartland Securities, and that the holding company had decided to rename itself United Group Alatau.

The new name looks to a new city. The bank explained the rebrand as a wish to take part in the development of Alatau, the city formed in Almaty Region in early 2024, Kursiv reported, and said the elements of its new logo stand for the city’s four districts. Under the new name the bank became general sponsor of the Kazakhstan Football Federation and title partner of the Kazakhstan Premier League in June 2025, Russian Wikipedia says, and AIRPress describes its work with Binance Kazakhstan on a purchase paid in cryptocurrency through a QR code.

For a design guide, Jusan Bank shows how a bank name can carry a landscape: a steppe plant, spelt in Latin letters, that replaced a regional name after a recovery and was itself replaced six years later by the name of a city still being built. Compare Kaspi.kz, whose co-founder now owns the bank, and Halyk Bank, another Kazakh bank. For this guide we use a wormwood green and a steppe amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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