Bank CenterCredit Brand Guidelines: A 1988 Alma-Ata Cooperative Bank & #IronCard

A cooperative bank from the last Soviet years.

Bank CenterCredit traces its start to Alma-Ata, now Almaty, in the last years of the Soviet Union. The bank says it was registered in 1988 as the Alma-Ata Central Cooperative Bank, under a licence issued by the State Bank of the USSR. An Ant Group press release of March 2024 gives the founding date as 19 September 1988, and the news agency Trend also gave 1988 as the founding year when it reported on the bank in May 2022.

The bank’s own timeline says its first financial year closed in 1989, the year it opened a branch in Moscow and was first mentioned in Euromoney. It adds that in 1990 the Financial Times wrote about it in an article titled “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship,” describing it as the first commercial bank in the USSR; that description comes from the bank’s website. In the same year, the bank says, it opened branches in a dozen cities, including Karaganda, Pavlodar, Aktobe and Taraz.

From 1991 the bank operated as the Kazakh Central Joint Stock Bank, known as Centerbank, according to the biography of its board chairman on the bank’s site. In 1992 it received a general licence from the National Bank of Kazakhstan and began a public offering of its shares, and in 1993 it joined SWIFT and became one of the founders of the Kazakhstan Interbank Currency Exchange, the bank says. By 1996 it was representing Western Union’s money-transfer service in Kazakhstan.

The present name came from a merger. In December 1997 a government decree set out the reorganisation of CJSC Zhilstroybank, and Centerbank won the tender among commercial banks to merge with it, the bank says; the merger was completed in 1998, creating OJSC Bank CenterCredit. Bakhytbek Baiseitov, who chaired the cooperative bank’s management board from 1988, is today chairman of its board of directors, according to the bank’s website.

Kookmin, Zhilstroybank and Eco Center Bank.

In the 2000s the bank built a financial group around itself and looked abroad for partners. It says it joined Visa International in 2000 and launched its Quick Transfers money-transfer system, set up a pension fund in 2001 and a leasing company, CenterLeasing, in 2002, and opened a representative office in Moscow in 2005. In 2008–09 it signed a strategic partnership with Kookmin Bank of South Korea, and in 2010 the bank, Kookmin and the International Finance Corporation completed an equity deal; a “Korean Desk” for companies doing business with South Korea followed in 2011. The bank also says The Banker named it its Bank of the Year in Kazakhstan in 2010.

Kookmin left the shareholding in 2017, the bank says, and in March 2018 a block of 29.56 per cent of the ordinary shares, held until then by Tsesnabank, was sold to the bank’s major shareholders and a group of minority shareholders. Earlier, in March 2016, the bank had moved its systems to a new core banking platform, Colvir, and its board had decided to sell its Moscow subsidiary, Bank BCC-Moscow.

The most recent acquisition was at home. In May 2022 Trend reported that Bank CenterCredit had completed the purchase of 100 per cent of SB Alfa-Bank Kazakhstan, the Kazakh subsidiary of Alfa-Bank, paid for from its own funds, and that the unit would be re-registered under a new name. The bank’s timeline calls it Eco Center Bank and says it was merged into Bank CenterCredit after shareholders and the financial regulator approved the reorganisation in August and September 2022. Interfax-Kazakhstan described Bank CenterCredit in May 2025 as Kazakhstan’s third-largest bank by assets.

Its retail brand is built around cards and an app. The bank names its cards with hashtags: #cardcard, launched in January 2020 as what the bank calls the first monochrome credit card; #IronCard, a premium metal contactless card from December 2019; and #TravelCard and #GoldCard in the current range. Its app, BCC.KZ, carries transfers by phone number, cross-border since January 2022, and a “Digital Notary” service launched with the Ministry of Justice in 2025, the bank says. In March 2024 Ant Group Digital Technologies announced that BCC would use its mPaaS mobile platform to introduce the bank’s first super-app in Kazakhstan.

How banks in the region present themselves.

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.

Three languages, three letters.

Bank CenterCredit presents itself in Kazakh, Russian and English at bcc.kz and shortens its own name to BCC in product and company names such as BCC.KZ, BCC Invest and BCC Leasing. Its site lists 20 branches and more than 150 outlets and says the bank serves more than three million individual and business customers; the 2024 Ant Group release called it one of the oldest and largest banks in Kazakhstan.

Payments have been a steady theme in its own record. The bank says it was one of the first in Kazakhstan to offer Apple Pay, in November 2018, launched Samsung Pay in January 2020 and Google Pay in December 2021, and in 2025 began accepting WeChat Pay for merchants and sending transfers to Uzbekistan by phone number. In 2016 it launched Card for Fly, a travel card made with Air Astana.

Ratings and new markets fill the latest entries. In 2025 Moody’s raised its ratings to investment grade, at Baa3, the bank says, and its 2026 timeline adds a licence agreement with Orient Finans Bank in Uzbekistan for its Junior Bank platform, and what it calls “phygital” branches in Astana and Almaty.

For a design guide, Bank CenterCredit shows how a bank registered as a Soviet cooperative in 1988 can carry that history into hashtag-named cards, an app and a three-letter brand. Compare Halyk Bank and Kaspi.kz, two more banks based in Almaty. For this guide we use a deep green, a sea-glass tint and warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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