Bank of Baroda Brand Guidelines: A Maharaja’s 1908 Bank, the Baroda Sun & bob World

Founded in Baroda in 1908.

Bank of Baroda was founded on 20 July 1908 in the princely state of Baroda, in what is now Gujarat, by its ruler, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, according to the bank’s history page. English Wikipedia names several industrialists who joined him in setting it up. The bank says its first branch was at Mandvi, in Baroda itself; the city is now called Vadodara, and the bank’s head office is still there.

Growth came slowly and then abroad. The bank’s milestones list a first branch in Bombay in 1918, Calcutta in 1937 and Delhi in 1949. In 1953 it opened its first two overseas branches, at Mombasa in Kenya and Kampala in Uganda, serving Indian communities in East Africa, English Wikipedia says; a London branch followed in 1957. Later decades added branches and subsidiaries from Fiji and Mauritius to Guyana, the Gulf, New York and Brussels, and its tagline is “India’s International Bank,” English Wikipedia says. The bank also says it set up mobile branches in 1964. In 1976 it opened a branch in Brussels aimed, English Wikipedia says, at Indian diamond and jewellery firms with business in Antwerp; the same year, the bank says, it opened the first of its regional rural banks, at Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh.

On 19 July 1969 the Government of India nationalised Bank of Baroda along with 13 other major commercial banks. The bank’s history page notes the small change of name that came with it: “The Bank of Baroda Ltd.” became simply “Bank of Baroda.” It returned to the stock market with a public issue of shares in 1996, while the government remained its largest shareholder.

The Baroda Sun and the lowercase bob.

The bank’s current look dates from 2005, when, according to its milestones, it launched a new corporate identity, “The Baroda Sun,” and appointed the cricketer Rahul Dravid as brand ambassador. The rising-sun symbol has since carried over to the group’s companies: its technology subsidiary is called BarodaSun Technologies.

Around the sun the bank has built a wider brand system. It lists a brand mascot, “Stickman,” launched in 2010 to increase the use of alternate delivery channels and named “BOBMitra” in 2014; a signature tune in 2011, added, it says, to give the brand a sonic edge; and a run of sports endorsers, from the badminton players PV Sindhu and Kidambi Srikanth in 2017 to the cricketer Shafali Verma in 2022. In 2024 it announced Sachin Tendulkar as its global brand ambassador.

The most distinctive verbal habit is the lowercase “bob.” Savings accounts, deposits and current accounts are sold under names that begin with it, and in 2021 the bank launched bob World, its main mobile banking app; a payments app carries a name mixing Latin and Devanagari letters. The credit-card arm, BOBCARD Limited, formerly BOB Financial Solutions, keeps the capital letters. The bank’s website is offered in English, Hindi and Odia, and its centenary in 2007–08 was marked, in its own words, as “100 years young.”

The app has also drawn the regulator’s attention. In October 2023 the Reserve Bank of India directed the bank to suspend onboarding new customers on bob World over supervisory concerns, and lifted the restriction in May 2024 after corrective measures, English Wikipedia says.

How Indian banks present themselves.

Indian banks tend to present themselves through a short name and a bold symbol. The State Bank of India’s keyhole, drawn at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and adopted in 1971, replaced a banyan tree, The Hindu BusinessLine reported, and in 2017 the bank cut its long name to the letters SBI beside that symbol, The Economic Times reported. Across the sector, blues, reds and oranges are common in bank marks, usually pairing one symbol with a short wordmark.

Language is part of the identity. The keyhole came with matching lettering of the bank’s name in nine Indian languages, according to BusinessLine, and Indian bank signs and websites commonly set Hindi and English names side by side, with regional scripts added in different states. Names change too: UTI Bank became Axis Bank in 2007 because other organisations used the UTI name, Mint reported, and the merger of five associate banks into SBI on 1 April 2017 took their names off branch signboards, The Hindu reported.

Bank websites follow a common pattern. Pages on savings accounts, loans and cards sit beside digital banking apps, branch and cash-machine locators, and photographs of branches and staff. Financial inclusion has a long history in the sector’s self-presentation: BusinessLine dates its start to the nationalisation of fourteen banks in 1969, and government schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana appear in the State Bank of India’s website menus. The websites of both the State Bank of India and Axis Bank now sit at addresses ending in .bank.in.

Annual reports and corporate social responsibility programmes complete the picture, setting out branch networks, rural reach and foundation work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name and ownership changed, and what is documented about its symbol — and marks clearly what rests only on the bank’s own word.

Three banks in one from 2019.

The bank grew through takeovers long before its largest merger. English Wikipedia records a run of acquisitions from Hind Bank in 1958 to Benares State Bank in 2002, several of them rescues arranged at the Reserve Bank of India’s request. The largest change came in 2019. A merger of Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank into Bank of Baroda was announced in September 2018, and it took effect on 1 April 2019, the Mumbai daily Free Press Journal reported that day, with the Reserve Bank saying that branches of the two banks would function as Bank of Baroda outlets from April. The bank calls it the first ever tripartite amalgamation, and English Wikipedia describes it as the first three-way consolidation of banks in the country.

Overseas, the bank’s path has not always been smooth. English Wikipedia records that Tanzania nationalised its branches there in 1967, and that in February 2018 the bank notified the South African Reserve Bank that it would leave South Africa, after the country’s Financial Intelligence Centre fined it in September 2017 over the handling of certain client accounts. The bank later returned to Tanzania with a subsidiary in 2004.

Today the bank lists subsidiaries including Nainital Bank, BOB Capital Markets, BOBCARD and IndiaFirst Life Insurance, and international sites from Australia and Botswana to the United Kingdom, the United States and Zambia. Its website, like those of other Indian banks, has moved to a .bank.in address, and the older bankofbaroda.in links now forward there.

For a design guide, Bank of Baroda shows how a century-old public-sector bank can hang a whole system — mascot, tune, app names — on a single symbol. Compare State Bank of India, another public-sector bank, and Punjab National Bank. For this guide we use a burnt saffron, a dark umber and a marigold with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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