Al Rajhi Bank Brand Guidelines: A 1957 Riyadh Name, a 1988 Bank & the alrajhi Wordmark

A family name that became a listed bank.

Al Rajhi Bank dates its story to 1957. “Founded in 1957,” its website says, the business was established as a Saudi joint stock company in 1988, and its formal name is Al Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. The bank’s footer adds that it was licensed by a decision of the Saudi Minister of Finance dated to 1408 in the Hijri calendar, which corresponds to 1988, and that it works under the supervision of the Saudi Central Bank. Arab News gave the same founding year in November 2022, describing the bank as Tadawul-listed — that is, quoted on the Saudi Exchange in Riyadh.

The scale is large by the bank’s own count. Its “About” page lists more than 500 branches, more than 4,300 ATMs, more than 136 remittance centres and a staff of around 24,000. In 2022 Arab News called it one of the largest Islamic banks by capital, citing 2015 data; those are the paper’s words, not a ranking set out here.

Everything the bank sells is framed by Islamic finance. In plain terms, that means products built to avoid charging or paying interest, using sales, leases and profit-sharing structures instead. The bank says it “adheres to the Shariah principles in all its products and services” and that an independent Shariah Board, formally approved by its General Assembly of shareholders, supervises and reviews its dealings and issues rulings on them. A Shariah board is a panel of scholars in Islamic commercial law; the bank says its board is responsible for supervising its dealings and overseeing how its rulings are carried out.

That process has shaped the bank’s market moves. In May 2010 Arab News reported that the bank had stayed out of the international market for sukuk — Islamic bonds, in which investors hold a share in underlying assets rather than a loan — because its Shariah advisers were not satisfied with the structures on offer, and that its Malaysian arm was then preparing a ringgit sukuk with Cagamas, the Malaysian mortgage corporation, whose structure the board had approved.

Values, a slogan and a lower-case name.

The bank’s identity is set out in its own words more clearly than in any published design manual. Its website gives three core values — “People focused,” “Progressive” and “Principled” — and a purpose line, “We enable finance for your thriving future.” Its stated ambition is “to enrich people’s lives through a leading financial ecosystem built on seamless experiences, innovative solutions and endless opportunities.”

On screen, the name is written in lower case: the website and its news headlines refer to “alrajhi bank,” while the legal footer keeps the capitalised “Al Rajhi Bank.” Customer offers are organised into tiers named after payment cards — Classic, Affluent, Affluent Diamond and Private Banking — and the services carry their own short names: Tahweel, the bank’s remittance service, and mokafaa, a loyalty programme the bank says has more than 450 partners. The app, the bank says, offers more than 200 services.

A broader programme sits behind those names. Argaam, the Saudi market news site, reported in March 2024 that Tanfeeth, a business launched in October 2022 as part of the bank’s “Unbank the Bank” vision, had been renamed Atmaal; the bank’s own news page in October 2026 reported Atmal opening a new headquarters in the Qassim region. In September 2026 the bank announced that it ranked first among the most valuable brands in Saudi Arabia in the Kantar BrandZ study, according to its own news release.

The same lower-case name travels abroad. In June 2025 the Malaysian technology site Lowyat.net reported that Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia had renamed its Rize app — an app-only Islamic banking service introduced in 2022 — as “MY alrajhi,” merging it with the older alrajhi@24seven platform, and renaming the Rize savings account DuitPlus Savings Account-i.

How Gulf banks present themselves.

Gulf banks present themselves in two scripts at once. Emirates NBD and QNB both pair a short English name with a full Arabic one — QNB’s Arabic name, بنك قطر الوطني, reads simply as Qatar National Bank — so an identity has to work in right-to-left Arabic and left-to-right Latin, often on the same card, sign or app screen. The guides in this series look at marks built from geometric forms or from Arabic calligraphy, at palettes of deep blue, green and gold, and at photography that moves between city skylines and heritage scenes.

They also look at how banks organise what they sell. Retail, private and corporate banking usually sit in separate sections of a bank’s website, and the larger groups add brands of their own: Emirates NBD runs Emirates Islamic as its Islamic bank and Liv as its digital bank, and QNB has launched a digital bank called ezbank in Egypt.

Islamic finance shapes much of that design work. Islamic banking avoids interest, so financing is usually arranged as a sale at an agreed mark-up, a lease or a partnership, and products are reviewed by a board of Sharia scholars. Product pages for Islamic accounts and financing therefore have to explain those structures in plain language.

Banks in the region also tie their brands to national plans and to sustainability. QNB links its sustainability work to Qatar National Vision 2030, according to Wikipedia, and Emirates NBD built a 2026 campaign around Emirati Women’s Day. Brand work now reaches beyond the logo too: in December 2025 QNB launched a sonic identity that blends the oud with modern synthesisers, Gulf Times reported. Each guide sets out what can be checked about one bank — its founding, its mergers and its owners — and treats the palette shown as our own interpretation.

One name for a bank, a remittance service and an app.

Al Rajhi’s identity is a lesson in how much a bank can carry on its name alone. The family name dates to the bank’s 1957 origin; the corporate form dates to 1988; and the modern presentation is a single lower-case wordmark that appears on the Saudi website, on news releases and, since 2025, on the Malaysian app.

The other names in the system are short: Tahweel for remittances, mokafaa for the loyalty scheme, and customer tiers named after the cards customers carry. The family name also covers investment work: Al Rajhi Capital was the financial adviser and lead manager on the bank’s 2022 Tier 1 sukuk issue, Arab News reported, and that issue was settled in November 2022 with more than 125,000 subscribers.

The Islamic-finance framework is part of the brand rather than a separate product line. The Shariah Board appears on the “About” page next to the board of directors and executive management, and the bank describes compliance with Shariah principles as “one of the most important core quality standards.” For readers outside the region, that structure helps explain why the bank’s Malaysian arm moved into sukuk only once its scholars had approved a structure, as Arab News reported in 2010.

The scale of the bank shows up in its own numbers rather than in design flourishes: hundreds of branches, thousands of ATMs and a network of remittance centres, according to its website. The values it lists — people focused, progressive and principled — are the clearest public statement of tone.

For a design guide, Al Rajhi Bank shows how a lower-case wordmark and a handful of short service names can carry a large Islamic bank across two countries. Compare Saudi Exchange, where its shares trade, and Saudi National Bank, another Riyadh lender. For this guide we use indigo, a dark ink and a desert sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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