Bandhan Bank Brand Guidelines: A 2001 Microfinance Society, a 2015 Licence & Kolkata

A society, a lending company and a licence.

Bandhan Bank is a private-sector bank headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal, and its roots are in microfinance. The bank’s own history says its founder, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, watched small traders in Kolkata in the 1990s borrowing from moneylenders at high interest, and that this led him to set up Bandhan. It began in 2001 as a not-for-profit society. English Wikipedia says its microfinance work started in Bagnan, a village about 60 kilometres from Kolkata, and that it lent to individuals who were organised into groups.

The organisation changed its legal form twice before it became a bank. In 2006, the bank says, Bandhan acquired a non-banking financial company and set up Bandhan Financial Services Private Limited; in 2009 the microfinance portfolio moved from the society to that company. By 2010, the bank says, Bandhan had become the largest microfinance institution in India, a claim English Wikipedia repeats.

The step to a full bank came through the Reserve Bank of India. On 2 April 2014 India Today reported that the RBI had given in-principle approval to two applicants, the infrastructure lender IDFC and “Kolkata-based microfinance firm Bandhan,” which then had 18 months to meet the requirements of a bank. English Wikipedia dates the final licence to 17 June 2015, and the bank opened on 23 August 2015, with what its about page calls “a bouquet of products for customers in all segments.” Bandhan describes itself as the first microfinance company in India to receive a universal banking licence.

A universal bank with a microfinance core.

Bandhan Bank opened with what it counts as 2,523 banking outlets; English Wikipedia breaks that launch network down into 501 branches, 50 ATMs and 2,022 banking units. The bank says it opened its 1,000th branch and 4,000th banking outlet in 2020. English Wikipedia now gives more than 6,400 banking outlets in 35 of India’s 36 states and union territories, and says 73 per cent of its branches are in rural and semi-urban areas.

The range has widened well beyond group lending. The bank’s website today lists Micro Loans and top-up loans for existing micro-loan borrowers beside home loans, gold loans, agricultural loans and vehicle loans, along with cash-management and trade-finance services for businesses. Housing finance came through an acquisition: in 2019, the bank says, it bought the stake of HDFC Limited in GRUH Finance, an affordable-housing lender, and English Wikipedia says GRUH was merged into the bank that year.

The shares trade on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange of India. The Hindu reported in September 2018 that the bank had listed at the end of March that year, following an initial public offering. When the bank opened in 2015, English Wikipedia says, its outside shareholders included the International Finance Corporation, Caladium Investment, an arm of Singapore’s GIC, and the Small Industries Development Bank of India.

The brand line is in Hindi: “Aapka Bhala, Sabki Bhalai,” which the bank translates as “Your benefit, Everyone’s welfare.” The bank says its core purpose has moved from financial inclusion to what it calls inclusive banking, and it sets out its values as an acronym, CREATE, beginning with “cost-effective & simple” and “respect for all.” Its website also sorts its offers by audience, with sections for business owners, rural customers, salaried individuals and senior citizens.

Design and documentation.

Microfinance lenders present themselves less through products than through method. Grameen Bank’s website opens on its line “A bank for the poor” and describes loans made without collateral, with all transactions except disbursement handled at village-level centres. ASA International sets out the “ASA Model” on a page of its own, from the size of a branch to the rhythm of weekly or fortnightly collections. For these institutions the method is the brand.

Their websites are built around networks and products. They publish branch, client and village counts as dated figures, offer branch locators, and list named loans for small businesses, crops, livestock, housing and education, alongside savings accounts, pension schemes and insurance. Newer pages describe digital wallets and digital financial services, sometimes launched market by market. Where a lender’s pages show small shops, farms or field officers at work, this guide describes them in words rather than reproducing them.

Documentation is a large part of the look. Lenders publish annual reports, monthly reports, governance pages and pages on social performance or impact, and listed groups add investor sections and regulatory news. Regulators are part of the picture too: in Bangladesh, the economist Mustafa K Mujeri wrote in The Daily Star in 2025, non-governmental lenders are licensed by the Microcredit Regulatory Authority, set up under an act of 2006. Claims about what microcredit achieves are the lenders’ own, or those of prize committees and researchers, and are contested in the research literature.

This guide reads each lender from its own pages and from dated outside sources: who founded it, how its lending works, and how its name is used. The palettes here — warm oranges, greens and blues — are our own unofficial interpretations, not the lenders’ published values, and no logo, photograph or document is reproduced.

A holding company and a licence condition.

Bandhan Bank is held through a layered group structure. The Hindu described it in September 2018: Bandhan Financial Services owned all of Bandhan Financial Holdings, a non-operative financial holding company that was the bank’s promoter, then with an 82.28 per cent stake. The licence required that holding to come down to 40 per cent within three years of the bank opening.

When that had not happened, the regulator acted. In September 2018, The Hindu reported, quoting the bank’s stock-exchange filing, the RBI withdrew the bank’s general permission to open new branches, so that each new branch needed prior approval, and froze the pay of its chief executive at the existing level until further notice. The bank said it was taking the necessary steps to meet the licensing condition. English Wikipedia says the 2019 merger of GRUH Finance helped lower the promoter’s holding, and gives Bandhan Financial Holdings a 39.99 per cent stake as of 31 December 2021.

Since then the bank’s own timeline has been about systems and scale rather than ownership: it says it completed a core-banking-system overhaul in 2023 and marked ten years as a bank on 23 August 2025. Its about page frames the whole journey, from NGO to lending company to universal bank, as one aim: reaching people it describes as unbanked and under-banked, and offering what it calls last-mile banking.

For a design guide, Bandhan Bank shows how a microfinance name can carry over unchanged into a full bank, with a Hindi brand line doing much of the explaining. Compare Ujjivan, another Indian microfinance lender that became a bank, and HDFC Bank. For this guide we use a deep red, a warm saffron and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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