Bank of Georgia Brand Guidelines: Tbilisi’s 1994 Bank, SOLO & the Lion Finance Group

A 1994 company with older roots.

Bank of Georgia, in Georgian Sakartvelos Banki, is a universal bank with its head office in Tbilisi. Its audited financial statements for 2025 say JSC Bank of Georgia was established on 21 October 1994 as a joint stock company under Georgian law; English and Georgian Wikipedia add that it received its banking licence from the National Bank of Georgia on 15 December 1994.

The bank’s roots are older than the company. English Wikipedia says it traces its origins to 1903, was nationalised in the Soviet period as the state-owned Binsotsbank, and was privatised and renamed Bank of Georgia in 1994. Georgian Wikipedia says the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development took a stake in 2000 and the German development lender DEG followed in 2001, and that in 2000 the bank became the first company to place its securities on the Georgian Stock Exchange.

Growth through the 2000s came from acquisitions and new services. In 2004, English Wikipedia says, it bought TbilUniversalBank and the card processor Georgian Card. In 2006 it listed global depositary receipts in London — Civil.ge noted in 2012 that they had traded on the London Stock Exchange since 2006 — and, Georgian Wikipedia says, launched its iBank internet banking and mBank mobile banking. Georgian Wikipedia says that in 2007 the bank issued a Eurobond, which the group described as the first international bond offering by a Georgian company. In 2009 it introduced SOLO, a premium banking brand, and in 2014 it bought Tao Private Bank, which English Wikipedia describes as the ninth-largest bank in Georgia at the time.

A London holding company, then a new name.

Bank of Georgia has been owned through a London holding company since 2011. A new parent, Bank of Georgia Holdings, gained a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange on 28 February 2012, Civil.ge reported that month, adding that the Financial Times described it as the second foreign bank, after Investec, with a primary London listing. The holding was renamed BGEO Group in 2015, and in May 2018 the banking and investment businesses were split into two separately listed companies, Bank of Georgia Group PLC and Georgia Capital PLC, according to English Wikipedia and the bank’s own statements.

The next step took the group across a border. On 19 February 2024, the Evening Standard reported, Bank of Georgia Group agreed to buy the Armenian lender Ameriabank, expanding into a second country; OC Media reported the following day that the agreement covered 90% of the bank, with the EBRD keeping 10%. The group’s 2025 results say the acquisition was completed at the end of March 2024.

On 6 February 2025 the parent changed its name to Lion Finance Group PLC. The Twelfth Magpie, an investment site, wrote in March 2025 that the new name was meant to reflect the group’s presence beyond Georgia after the Ameriabank deal; English Wikipedia notes that Bank of Georgia and Ameriabank kept their own brands. Lion Finance’s results describe it as a holding company whose main subsidiaries are Bank of Georgia in Georgia and Ameriabank in Armenia, alongside the investment bank Galt and Taggart.

Bank of Georgia itself is no longer listed. English Wikipedia says its shares left the Georgian Stock Exchange on 27 June 2025, and its 2025 statements show JSC BGEO Group holding all of its shares at the end of that year. The parent moved up instead: FTSE Russell announced on 4 March 2026 that Lion Finance Group would join the FTSE 100 index, with effect from 23 March 2026.

Banks of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Many banks in Central Asia and the Caucasus now present themselves through their apps. In Kazakhstan, Kaspi.kz describes a single “Super App” that joins bill payments, an online marketplace, consumer credit, transfers and QR payments in shops, while Halyk Bank, the former state savings bank, sells its retail services through the Halyk SuperApp and its business services through Onlinebank. In the apps these two banks describe, loans, deposits, cards and transfers sit beside shopping, travel and government services.

Names are usually shown in more than one language and script. Halyk Bank’s full name appears in Kazakh as Қазақстан Халық Банкі, in Russian as Народный банк Казахстана and in English as Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan; Kaspi Bank was registered for years under the Russian name Банк Каспийский before it took its Latin-letter brand in 2008. Across the region, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani names may appear beside Latin and Cyrillic forms, so a wordmark has to work in several alphabets at once.

Many of these banks now operate across borders. Halyk Group runs subsidiaries in Georgia and Uzbekistan, and Kaspi.kz has bought classified-advert sites in Azerbaijan and businesses in Turkey. Halyk’s website lists loans, deposits, cards and transfers, and both groups, as listed companies, publish investor-relations sections with financial results for shareholders.

Colour and type vary from bank to bank. The palettes in this series of guides — reds, greens, blues and teals among them — are our own unofficial interpretations, set beside a Google Fonts stand-in for each brand. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name changed, who owns it and how it presents its services — and keeps figures such as customer numbers to a minimum, attributed to the source and date that gave them.

Three segments, 200 branches, one name.

For customers, the bank is organised around three segments, its statements say: retail banking, banking for small and medium-sized businesses, and corporate banking. Its 2025 audited statements count 200 branches in Georgia’s major cities at the end of 2025, up from 189 a year earlier. English Wikipedia lists retail products from consumer and mortgage loans to cards, transfers and deposits, with SOLO serving mass-affluent and high-net-worth clients. Georgian Wikipedia says the group set out a strategy centred on digital development and customer service in 2019, and that in 2022 the bank created sCoolApp, which it describes as Georgia’s first financial mobile app for school pupils. The group’s 2025 results also list Digital Area, a Georgian digital business covering e-commerce, ticketing and inventory software, among its other businesses.

The name also travels beyond banking. English Wikipedia lists Bank of Georgia as general sponsor of the Georgian National Olympic and Paralympic Committees and the Georgian Football Federation, and as main sponsor of the Georgian Basketball Federation; it also funds students through scholarship programmes that include the Fulbright and Chevening schemes. The palette and typeface on this page are our own interpretation, chosen to sit beside Georgian script as well as Latin.

For a design guide, Bank of Georgia shows how a bank can keep its own name while the group above it is renamed around two countries. Compare Ameriabank, its Armenian sister bank in the same group, and TBC Bank, another Tbilisi bank. For this guide we use a deep navy, a warm orange and a stone grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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