A comptoir of 1848, a bank of 1872 and a merger in 2000.

BNP Paribas carries two older names side by side. One half comes from the Banque nationale de Paris, or BNP. French Wikipedia says the BNP was created on 4 May 1966, when the Banque nationale pour le commerce et l’industrie (BNCI) and the Comptoir national d’escompte de Paris (CNEP) were merged under the finance minister Michel Debré. The CNEP itself went back to March 1848, when the provisional government of the Second Republic set up discount offices to restart lending during the economic crisis of 1847–1848.

The other half comes from the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, founded in 1872 from two earlier houses, the Banque de crédit et de dépôt des Pays-Bas and the Banque de Paris, according to French Wikipedia. Its short name has a practical origin. The bank was nationalised in February 1982 and took the name Paribas, which, French Wikipedia notes, had been its telegraphic address since the early twentieth century. A word made to save letters on a telegram became the name on the door.

The two banks came together after a contested battle on the stock market in 1999, which also involved Société Générale. French Wikipedia dates the birth of the combined group to 23 May 2000, when a general meeting of shareholders approved the creation of BNP Paribas. The new name simply joined the two existing ones, with no new word coined to replace them.

The group kept growing under the joined name. French Wikipedia records that it bought the Italian bank Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in 2006 and the Belgian bank Fortis in 2009, launching the BNP Paribas Fortis brand that year, and that it opened the online bank Hello bank! on 17 June 2013. French Wikipedia lists the group’s retail banks under names such as BNP Paribas Fortis in Belgium, BNL BNP Paribas in Italy and BGL BNP Paribas in Luxembourg.

Altaï and the courbe d’envol.

The BNP Paribas logo has a well-documented launch. On 28 April 2000 the French marketing weekly Stratégies reported that the takeover of Paribas had given the BNP a chance to refresh its visual identity, and that the new mark had been designed by the Paris agency Altaï, whose creative director was Laurent Vincenti. The magazine described the symbol as a star that turns into a swallow, meant to stand for a European company setting out into the world. It replaced the grey screen of the old BNP logo, which Stratégies said had been created some fifteen years earlier.

Vincenti told the magazine that the mark was meant to tell a story, and that, to suggest openness, it was not closed inside a frame and could be used flexibly, while staying credible with business clients. Depending on whether the bank was speaking to private customers or to companies, the article said, it would put more weight on the symbol or on the typography. That typography was set entirely in capitals, to remove any hierarchy between BNP and Paribas.

Stratégies also named the team behind the project. Altaï, which specialised in retail banking networks, worked with the English agency Rodney Fitch, and a customer study confirmed the final choice, ahead of the other agencies consulted: Carré noir, Dragon rouge, Euro RSCG Design and Landor. The logo’s public debut, the magazine said, would be at the Roland-Garros tennis tournament, on the backdrops behind the courts. From December the mark was to be applied to the group’s branches, a six-month job given to Plan créatif, while Altaï handled signage and shop windows.

French Wikipedia, citing Stratégies, says the design was made under the bank’s communications director Antoine Sire and is called the courbe d’envol, the flight curve. It gives the bank’s reading of the symbol: the stars evoke Europe and universality, their change into birds evokes openness, freedom and the ability to adapt, and the rounded curve of the flight places the logo in the world of living things. The same article says the green square behind the symbol stands for nature and optimism, citing a second Stratégies report from April 2000.

European banks and their marks.

Bank names are often the residue of mergers. Two or three older institutions combine, and the new name is either a fresh coinage, a stack of the founders’ names, or a set of initials that once spelled out something longer. Over time the initialism tends to become the name in its own right, and the long form is quietly retired; the letters stay because customers already know them, while the words behind them no longer describe what the bank does.

Visual identity in banking leans on a small set of devices. Heraldic animals such as lions, and symbols such as keys, stars and birds, borrow the language of seals and coats of arms, signalling continuity and safekeeping. Banks often pair a single symbol with one dominant brand colour, used flat across branches, cards, apps and statements, so that the colour does the recognition work even when the logo is small.

Taglines carry the rest. They change more often than logos do, and are best read as dated campaigns rather than permanent parts of the mark. When studying a bank identity, it helps to separate the long-lived core — name, symbol, colour — from the advertising layer that sits on top of it.

One symbol, many local names.

The flight curve has stayed in place since 2000, but the logo around it has been adjusted several times. The file captions on French Wikipedia list one version used from the merger until March 2007, another from March 2007 to February 2009, a third from February 2009 to March 2015, and a signature logo used since March 2015. In each, the stars and birds keep their role as the group’s symbol, with the name set in capitals beside them.

Before 2000 the two parent banks had marks of their own. The same captions show a Paribas logo from 1962 to 1968 and another from 1978 to 1999, and BNP logos from 1975 to 1996 and from 1996 to 1999. The merger replaced both families with a single symbol, and Stratégies reported in April 2000 that the change was meant to make the bank feel more open and closer to the public than the old institutional style.

Stratégies described the design in 2000 as flexible, with the symbol or the lettering given more weight depending on the audience, and the group’s local banks carry the parent name beside their own. The decision to unveil the mark on the backdrops of Roland-Garros also tied the new identity to tennis from its debut.

Colour is the other constant. Stratégies described the symbol and the capitals; the bank’s own explanation, as French Wikipedia reports it, gives the green square a meaning of nature and optimism.

For a design guide, BNP Paribas shows how a merger can be told through a single moving image, stars becoming birds, while two old names are simply set side by side in capitals. Compare Santander, another European bank built around one symbol, and Deutsche Bank, whose slash mark is another one-symbol identity. For this guide we use green, deep green and mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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