Attijariwafa Bank Brand Guidelines: Tangier 1904, Casablanca 2004 & the Simple Neobank

A 1904 branch, a 1911 branch and a 1964 change of hands.

Attijariwafa Bank is the product of two older Moroccan banks, and both began in Tangier, as branches of banks from outside Morocco. French Wikipedia traces Wafabank to 1904, when the Compagnie française de crédit et de banque opened in the city through its Algerian subsidiary, the Compagnie algérienne de crédit et de banque. In 1964 that business was Moroccanised, the article says, and became the Compagnie marocaine de crédit et de banque; by 1968 the Kettani family held a majority of its shares. It took the name Wafabank in 1985 and listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange in 1993. French Wikipedia also credits it with introducing Morocco’s first credit card and cash machines in 1980.

The second bank, Banque Commerciale du Maroc (BCM), was founded in 1911 after the Banque transatlantique set up a branch in Tangier, according to both the English and French Wikipedia articles, and grew into a commercial banking group across Morocco. The sources used for this guide do not say how either bank operated during the Second World War years.

The two came together in two steps. In 2003, French Wikipedia says, BCM took control of Wafabank through a holding company that owned Wafa Assurance, itself a Wafabank shareholder; in 2004 the merged group adopted a new identity and name, Attijariwafa bank. English Wikipedia dates the merger itself to 2004. The name joins two Arabic words: attijari, meaning “commercial”, and wafa, meaning “fidelity”, French Wikipedia explains. The group itself writes the name with a lower-case “bank”. Its largest shareholder is the investment holding company Al Mada, which held about 46.5 per cent at the end of 2023, according to English Wikipedia, and its shares trade on the Casablanca Stock Exchange.

From Tunis to Brazzaville in a decade.

Expansion south of the Sahara has defined the group since the merger. English Wikipedia sets out the sequence: in 2005, with Banco Santander, it bought a majority of Banque du Sud in Tunisia, later renamed Attijari Bank; in Senegal it gained a licence in 2005, opened in 2006 and in January 2007 bought a majority of Banque Sénégalo-Tunisienne. In April 2008 it took a majority of the Compagnie Bancaire de l’Afrique Occidentale, and by December that year had merged its Senegalese businesses under the name CBAO Groupe Attijariwafa bank. Banque internationale pour le Mali followed in November 2008.

In late 2009 the group bought Crédit Agricole’s banks in four countries: Crédit du Congo in Brazzaville, Union Gabonaise de Banque in Libreville, Société Ivoirienne de Banque in Abidjan and Crédit du Sénégal in Dakar. Mauritania came in 2010 in partnership with the BCP group, then Société Commerciale de Banque Cameroun, and in September 2013 Banque Internationale pour l’Afrique au Togo. Through CBAO it opened in Burkina Faso in 2011, Niger in 2013 and Benin in 2015, English Wikipedia says. In May 2017, French Wikipedia records, it completed the purchase of all of Barclays Bank Egypt, and in 2022 it opened Attijari Bank Tchad. One holding went the other way: Cogebanque in Rwanda, held from 2016, passed to Equity Group in 2022.

Asked about that record by Financial Afrik in October 2026, the group’s Directeur Général, Ismail Douiri, said the bank had entered the markets of 14 other African countries through 12 banks in which it holds a majority, and that the withdrawal of several French banks from Africa had sometimes brought it new clients looking for a bank with a wide correspondent network. In Morocco itself, French Wikipedia says, the group set up Dar Assafaa in 2010 as a subsidiary for Islamic finance.

How African banks present themselves.

African banks speak to very different audiences at once: city professionals and market traders, multinational companies and small farms, customers with a branch on the corner and customers whose nearest branch is a long journey away. Their identities tend to reflect that range. Bold geometric marks, simple enough to read on a branch sign, a card or a phone screen, sit alongside palettes built on strong blues, reds and greens.

Photography carries much of the message. Annual reports and campaign pages often pair city skylines with everyday customers photographed across the continent, from shop owners and farmers to students and young families. Many groups also publish footprint maps that show where they operate, a visual shorthand for a pan-African presence that may run through subsidiaries trading under different local names.

Digital channels have become a central part of the brand. Bank websites give prominent space to mobile apps and to USSD menus, the short dial codes that work on basic phones without data, alongside pages for small-business banking and agriculture lending programmes. The tone on these pages is usually practical, written to explain how to open an account, send money or apply for credit.

Reporting is the other half of the identity. Large banking groups publish integrated, sustainability and financial-inclusion reports, and these documents often carry the most considered typography and photography a bank produces. This guide looks at each brand’s history and what can be checked about how it presents itself, and treats the colours and type shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than official brand assets.

From L’bankalik to Simple.

At home, the group has spent the past decade building digital brands alongside its branch network. At the end of 2016 it launched L’bankalik, an online bank aimed at Moroccans aged 18 to 34, French Wikipedia says, and in August 2023 it introduced payments with Apple Pay, according to English Wikipedia.

The larger step came on 25 May 2026, when the bank launched Simple, which it presented as Morocco’s first neobank, Medias24 reported the same day. The paper described Simple as an everyday “super-app” that combines banking, payments, lifestyle services, a community feature and investment in one mobile interface, free to download for all Moroccans, with a freemium model of four subscription tiers named Go, Plus, Prime and Metal. Services within the app carry names such as SimplePay, SimpleShare and SimpleInvest. Cards are also sold in physical outlets, from railway stations to the Wafacash network and the bank’s own branches, giving the brand more than 7,000 points of contact across Morocco, according to the same report. Medias24 also noted that Simple arrived ten years after L’bankalik, which the group says has around a million customers.

The group’s brands outside banking carry the same root. Wafa Assurance, its insurance arm, held shares in the group in 2013, English Wikipedia notes, and Wafacash runs a network of outlets that now sells Simple cards. Across Africa, the Senegalese business merged in 2008 took the group’s name into its own: CBAO Groupe Attijariwafa bank.

For a design guide, Attijariwafa Bank shows how a merged group can carry one invented name across banks with their own local histories. Compare Barclays, whose Egyptian bank it bought in 2017, and Ecobank, another group with banks across West and Central Africa. For this guide we use a saffron, a burnt amber and a cedar brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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