ANZ Brand Guidelines: Bank of Australasia 1835, Two Mergers & a Lotus Symbol

Three London-founded banks for the colonies.

ANZ dates its story to 1835. The Bank of Australasia was a London bank — incorporated by royal charter in March 1834, English Wikipedia says — and it opened its first branch in Sydney on 14 December 1835, followed on 1 January 1836 by Hobart and Launceston, where it took over the Cornwall Bank. It reached Melbourne in 1838 and Adelaide in 1839, and opened in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin in 1864.

A second London bank followed. The Union Bank of Australia was set up in October 1837 after the Van Diemen’s Land banker Philip Oakden won the backing of George Fife Angas; it opened its first branch in Launceston on 1 May 1838 and its first New Zealand branch, in Wellington, in 1840. Both banks came through the banking crisis of the 1890s, Wikipedia says. A third, the English, Scottish & Australian Bank, was formed in London in 1852 and opened in Sydney in 1853.

The modern group came from two mergers. On 1 October 1951 the Bank of Australasia and the Union Bank combined as the Australia and New Zealand Bank, and on 1 October 1970 that bank merged with ES&A to form the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, the name it still uses. In 1977 it moved its incorporation from the United Kingdom to Australia, and its head office is in Melbourne.

From Grindlays to Suncorp Bank.

Growth came through acquisitions at home and abroad. ANZ bought the Bank of Adelaide in 1979 and Grindlays Bank in 1984, and in 1989 it bought PostBank from the New Zealand government, English Wikipedia records. In 2003 it acquired the National Bank of New Zealand; for nearly a decade it ran two brands there, before retiring the National Bank name in 2012, when its New Zealand company became ANZ Bank New Zealand. In Asia it expanded through the 2000s, buying Royal Bank of Scotland businesses in several countries in 2009 and 2010, then in October 2016 announced the sale of its Asian retail and wealth operations to DBS Bank.

Its largest recent deal was in Queensland. ANZ agreed to buy Suncorp Bank from Suncorp in July 2022; the competition regulator, the ACCC, blocked the deal in 2023, the Australian Competition Tribunal overturned that decision in February 2024, and ANZ completed the purchase at the end of July 2024, Mortgage Professional Australia reported in September 2026, bringing about 1.2 million customers into the group. The same report said Suncorp Bank accounts would move fully to ANZ by June 2027, when the Suncorp Bank brand is to be retired. In November 2026 the magazine reported that ANZ had committed to keep every regional branch open until at least December 2030 and to open a new branch in Bendigo.

Its digital bank, ANZ Plus, launched in March 2022, according to Wikipedia, and Mortgage Professional Australia reported in 2026 that the platform had been brought to all of ANZ’s retail customers ahead of the original schedule. The bank has also faced scrutiny. In 2018 the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry heard that ANZ had not verified the living expenses of home-loan customers referred by mortgage brokers, and that processing problems had led it to charge some home-loan customers the wrong interest rate for more than ten years.

How Australian and New Zealand banks present themselves.

Australian and New Zealand banks tend to present themselves through one strong symbol and one strong colour. The Commonwealth Bank has a diamond, which it refreshed in October 2020 to make it, in its marketing chief’s words to Campaign Brief, “lighter, brighter and more dynamic”; Westpac has kept the W of the old Bank of New South Wales since taking its new name in 1982. Across the banks in this guide, symbols and wordmarks tend to appear in bold colours, yellow, red, blue and green among them.

Their websites and campaigns lean on plain-English copy and on people rather than products. The Commonwealth Bank’s 2020 “Can Lives Here” campaign featured real customers rather than actors, Campaign Brief reported, and Westpac’s 2026 “Double You” campaign was framed around practical help with everyday financial admin. Photography of customers, cities and landscapes fills the space between the pages on home loans, everyday accounts, business banking and the mobile apps.

Sport and community programmes are part of the identity too. The Commonwealth Bank’s name has been attached to Australian cricket since 1987 and to the national women’s football teams since 2021, according to Wikipedia, while Westpac has sponsored a rescue helicopter service since 1973. Banks also publish annual and sustainability reports each year, which set out their brands, strategies and regulatory matters in their own words.

The banks share a recent history as well. The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, established in December 2017, examined the major lenders, and its final report was made public in February 2019. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — who founded it, who owns it and how its identity has changed — with the companies’ own claims marked as theirs.

A lotus for three markets.

ANZ’s current symbol dates from 2009. According to English Wikipedia, the logo was designed by the agency M&C Saatchi and introduced as the bank set out to become a major regional bank in Asia Pacific. It shows a stylised three-petalled lotus standing for Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific, the bank’s three core markets, with a central human shape representing its customers and its people.

Its advertising has leaned on characters. In 2006 it introduced a falcon as a mascot for its work against card fraud, a theme relaunched in April 2024, Wikipedia says; “ANZ Falcon” is still the name its website gives to its transaction-monitoring technology. From 2010 it ran a campaign parodying banking through a fictional manager called Barbara. It has sponsored the Australian Open tennis tournament, renewing that deal in 2014 for five more years. Its world headquarters at Melbourne’s Docklands, designed by HASSELL and Lend Lease Design, opened in late 2009 and won the interiors and fit-out category at the 2010 World Architecture Festival, according to Wikipedia. Its architecture also carries the older banks. The ornate Collins Street building known as the Gothic Bank, built as the head office of ES&A and later used by ANZ as its Melbourne headquarters, was sold in 2016, and in Sydney ANZ is the main tenant of the ANZ Bank Centre, a tower designed by Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp and completed in April 2013, Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, ANZ shows how a bank built from three colonial lenders can sum up its geography in a single symbol. Compare Suncorp, whose bank ANZ bought in 2024, and NAB, another Melbourne bank formed by merging colonial banks. For this guide we use a deep blue, a sky blue and a pale mist with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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