Bank of Queensland Brand Guidelines: An 1874 Building Society, Owner-Managers & ME Bank

From building society to Bank of Queensland.

Bank of Queensland began in Brisbane in 1874 as the Brisbane Permanent Benefit Building and Investment Society, English Wikipedia says. It is not the first bank in the state to carry the name: a Bank of Queensland founded in 1863 closed in 1866 during the financial panic of that year, and another took the name in 1917 before being absorbed by the National Bank in 1922.

The society was incorporated in 1887, amalgamated with the City and Suburban Building Society in 1921 and with the Queensland Deposit Bank about a decade later. It remained a savings bank and building society until 1942, when it gained a trading bank licence as the Brisbane Building and Banking Company. On 1 May 1970 that company changed its name to Bank of Queensland; it computerised its operations the same year and listed on the Australian stock exchange in 1971. A company history by A. N. Murrell, The first one hundred and ten years, was published by the bank in 1987.

For most of the twentieth century it was a Queensland institution. Between 2001 and 2004 it opened 55 branches in the state, then expanded into New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory in 2004 and into the Northern Territory and Western Australia in 2006. It bought Pioneer Permanent Building Society in 2006 and merged with Home Building Society in Western Australia and Mackay Permanent Building Society in 2007, English Wikipedia says. In 2007 it also made a merger proposal to Bendigo Bank, which was turned down.

Its slogans tracked its ambitions: “bank different” from 2002 to 2011, “Your own personal bank” from 2010, and, from 2013, “It’s possible to love a bank.”

Owner-managers and the franchise model.

The national expansion was built on a franchise model. Many branches were run by Owner Managers, local small-business owners who employed the branch staff, met its running costs and were paid commissions on the loans, deposits and other products they arranged, while the bank kept control of the brand, policies, products and operations, English Wikipedia says. BOQ described the aim as offering “communities the security of a national bank combined with local know-how.”

The model brought disputes. After lending losses in 2011, linked to the 2010–11 Queensland floods, the bank reduced its network and bought out some branch owners. Some franchisees sued between 2014 and 2016; in 2014 the bank successfully defended a case brought by eleven franchisees in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and the Court of Appeal rejected their appeal in 2015. The franchise model was also examined during the 2017–19 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Separately, English Wikipedia records that a Townsville branch had lent to clients of the collapsed adviser Storm Financial, and that ASIC brought compensation proceedings against BOQ on their behalf.

In August 2024 BOQ announced that it would take control of its 114 owner-managed branches and convert them to corporate branches, a process expected to run until March 2025, 7NEWS reported. The chief executive called the bank’s “heritage retail banking operating model” no longer sustainable in its current form, pointing to customers’ shift to digital banking, and thanked the owner-managers for their part in the bank’s 150-year history.

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.

Virgin Money, ME and a Queensland heritage.

Bank of Queensland now sits at the head of a group of brands. In 2013 it bought Virgin Money Australia, gaining rights to the Virgin Money name in Australia for four decades in return for royalties to the Virgin Group, English Wikipedia says; BOQ says the business runs as a standalone unit within the group. In 2014 it acquired Investec Professional Finance, now BOQ Specialist, which serves medical, dental, veterinary and accounting professionals, and it also runs the asset-finance arm BOQ Finance.

The largest step was ME Bank, the Melbourne direct bank founded in 1994 as Super Member Home Loans by Australia’s industry superannuation funds. The competition regulator approved the purchase in January 2021 and the Treasurer in June, and ME became a BOQ subsidiary in July 2021, English Wikipedia says; the ME brand was kept alongside BOQ and Virgin Money.

The bank’s sponsorships lean on its home state. BOQ says it became a major sponsor of the Queensland Reds rugby union team in 2025, reviving a relationship that ran from 1995 to 2005, with its logo on the sleeves of the men’s and women’s playing jerseys, and that it became presenting partner of the Ekka, the Royal Queensland Show, the same year; it also lists a partnership with the mobile laundry charity Orange Sky since 2019. BOQ was inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame in 2014.

For a design guide, Bank of Queensland shows how a Queensland bank can carry a regional identity across several national brands. Compare Bendigo Bank, which turned down its merger proposal in 2007, and Suncorp, another Brisbane financial name. For this guide we use a golden yellow, a deep navy and a soft stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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