American Asiatic Underwriters, 1919.

AIG was not founded in America. On 19 December 1919, according to Wikipedia, the American Cornelius Vander Starr set up a general insurance agency called American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai. By the late 1920s it had branches across China and South-East Asia, including the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, Wikipedia says.

The names came in layers. In 1926 Starr opened his first office in the United States under a second name, American International Underwriters Corporation, or AIU, and the business went on to open in Latin America, reaching Havana in the late 1930s, Wikipedia says. In 1939 Starr moved his headquarters from Shanghai to New York City. The word “Asiatic” belonged to the first company; “International” to the second.

After the Second World War, AIU entered Japan and Germany to insure American military personnel, and through the late 1940s and early 1950s opened offices in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, Wikipedia says. In 1952 Starr turned to the American market by acquiring the Globe & Rutgers Fire Insurance Company and its subsidiary American Home Fire Assurance Company. By then the group was a collection of agencies and companies under different names, held together by Starr himself.

The umbrella name arrived in 1967. That year, Wikipedia says, American International Group, Inc. was incorporated as a unifying organisation for most of C.V. Starr’s general and life insurance businesses. In 1968 Starr named Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, whom he had hired in 1960 to develop an international accident and health business, as his successor; the company went public in 1969 and listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 1984, according to Wikipedia.

The group is known by its initials, AIG, the form that appears in the sponsorships and the 2012 relaunch described below; the full name, American International Group, remains the legal one.

Shirts, sub-brands and a return.

The three letters went onto a football shirt in 2006. AIG was the shirt sponsor of Manchester United from 2006 until 2010, Wikipedia says, and Radio New Zealand reported in October 2012 that the four-year deal had expired at the end of the 2009–10 season.

The group’s crisis then reshaped its naming. Business Insurance reported in November 2012 that AIG had adopted the name Chartis for its commercial property and casualty operations in 2009, after a federal intervention in 2008 saved the company from collapse. Its life and retirement operations traded as SunAmerica Financial Group. Wikipedia also says that in late 2008 AIG rebranded its US auto insurance unit as 21st Century Insurance. For a few years, the parent name stepped back behind its sub-brands.

The return was announced in stages. In June 2012, Business Insurance reported, AIG said it would revert to the AIG name for its commercial property and casualty business, replacing Chartis, and that SunAmerica would become AIG Life and Retirement. AIG later announced that it was adopting a new logo. Then, on Sunday 11 November 2012, the company said it had begun using the AIG name as its brand again and had adopted a new brand promise: “Bring on tomorrow.” The publication quoted the chief executive, Robert H. Benmosche, saying in a statement that “AIG as a global insurance brand is back.”

Between those two announcements came a second shirt. On 12 October 2012, Radio New Zealand reported, AIG agreed to sponsor New Zealand’s national rugby teams, among them the All Blacks, the All Blacks Sevens, the Māori All Blacks and the Black Ferns. The AIG logo was to sit on the black jersey, centred below the silver fern and the adidas logo. The chief executive of the New Zealand Rugby Union, Steve Tew, admitted the move might not be popular with fans, RNZ reported, while the former All Black Sir John Kirwan, at the launch, said the deal had to happen. The All Blacks Sevens were to wear the logo first, at the opening leg of the IRB Sevens World Series on the Gold Coast, and the All Blacks a week later in the final Bledisloe Cup test in Brisbane, RNZ said.

Insurance names, symbols and colours.

Insurance identities have an unusual job: they sell a promise that may not be called on for decades, so the visual language tends to signal permanence rather than novelty. Many of the long-established houses reach for heraldry — eagles, lions, shields and robed allegorical figures — borrowing the vocabulary of civic seals and coats of arms to suggest that the company will still be standing when a policy matures. Over time, many of those emblems have been simplified, flattened and redrawn for screens, often keeping a single recognisable silhouette while losing the fine engraving of the originals.

A second family of marks reduces the name to a single letter or a short set of initials, which travels across languages and reads at small sizes on an app icon. Blue recurs across the sector because it is widely read as calm and dependable, though reds and deep greens also appear. Sponsorship adds another layer: stadium and arena naming rights, shirt deals and long-running mascot or character campaigns have put insurance names in front of audiences who never read a policy document, and the end of such a deal can be as visible as its start.

One name, then two companies.

The 2012 relaunch put the parent name back at the centre, and later changes narrowed what it covered. In 2017, Wikipedia says, AIG announced plans to reorganise its commercial and consumer segments into General Insurance and Life & Retirement. As part of a plan announced in 2020, the life and retirement business was prepared for a separate stock market listing in 2022, and after the spin-off it became an independent company called Corebridge Financial, Wikipedia says. The AIG name stayed with the general insurance business.

Sport has remained a stage for the brand. In 2019, according to Wikipedia, AIG signed a contract to be title sponsor of the Women’s British Open golf championship, and in 2020 the event was renamed the AIG Women’s Open; in 2023 the company said it would remain title sponsor through 2030. The pattern repeats one seen with the football and rugby shirts: the three letters placed on an existing sporting institution rather than on a new one.

The 2012 wording mattered too. The relaunch line, “Bring on tomorrow,” and the statement that the brand was “back” framed the 2012 change as a return rather than a reinvention, after three years in which the parent name had stepped behind Chartis and SunAmerica.

The origins remain part of the record. Founded by an American in Shanghai, moved to New York on the eve of the Second World War, and gathered under one corporate name only in 1967, AIG’s name is a product of consolidation: agencies and companies with different names brought under one roof, and finally under three letters.

For a design guide, AIG shows how initials can carry a brand through sub-brands and back again, and how sponsorship of an existing institution — a club shirt, a national jersey, a championship title — can carry a name alongside a logo. Compare HSBC, another financial brand with roots in Shanghai and a name reduced to initials, and MetLife, a New York insurer that also put its name on a stadium. For this guide we use navy, a signal blue and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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