Cathay Life Brand Guidelines: A 1962 Taipei Opening, a 1964 Listing and a Three-Green Tree

A Taipei office opened in 1962.

Cathay Life Insurance (國泰人壽) opened in Taipei on 10 September 1962, in offices on Nanyang Street, with Tsai Wan-chun as chairman and general manager and Tsai Wan-lin as executive director and deputy general manager, according to Chinese Wikipedia. Chinese Wikipedia dates the company’s incorporation to August 1957 and names Lin Ting-li alongside the two Tsais as its founders; the company itself and English Wikipedia give 1962 as the founding year, and English Wikipedia says the firm was founded by Tsai Wan-lin and members of his family.

It moved quickly onto the public market. Cathay Life listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 1964, and Chinese Wikipedia calls it the first insurer to list there. The company dates its Tamsui training campus and its women’s basketball team to 1969 and the first Cathay national children’s drawing contest to 1970. In 1977, its milestones say, it opened a head office on Xiang-Yang Road and founded Cathay General Hospital; Tsai Wan-lin became chairman in 1979, and Tsai Hung-tu in 1990.

In December 2001 Cathay Life formed Cathay Financial Holdings through a share swap, and the new holding company became its parent, Chinese Wikipedia says. The group then added a property insurer and a bank, merged in 2003 as Cathay United Bank, alongside securities and fund businesses. Chinese Wikipedia calls Cathay Life the core company of the Lin Yuan Group and of Cathay Financial Holdings.

Protection, savings, long-term care and service.

Cathay Life describes its business as individual traditional life, accident and health insurance, group insurance, annuities and investment-linked policies, together with micro insurance for low-income households, travel cover and a long-term care scheme for civil servants and teachers. Its milestones list a run of firsts it claims in Taiwan’s market, among them policies in US dollars in 2008 and renminbi in 2013, a Cathay Life App in 2013 and online insurance in 2014.

Abroad, the company says it became the first Taiwanese firm to set up an insurer in mainland China when Cathay Life Insurance (China), a joint venture with China Eastern Airlines, began in January 2005; English Wikipedia also calls it the first Taiwanese life insurer to enter the Chinese market, starting in Shanghai. In 2014 Lujiazui Financial Development replaced the airline as partner and the venture became Cathay Lujiazui Life. A wholly owned Vietnamese subsidiary followed in 2008. Earlier ties, the company says, included a 1976 agreement with Nippon Life on international group insurance, a 1983 partnership with Travelers, a Tokyo office in 1993 and a Hong Kong representative office in 1997. In 2015 Cathay Life won the auction, run by Taiwan’s insurance stabilization fund, for the business of two insurers, Global Life (國寶人壽) and Singfor Life (幸福人壽), Chinese Wikipedia says.

Its investments reach into asset management. Cathay Life bought the US investment manager Conning in 2014, Chinese Wikipedia says, and in April 2024 completed its sale to Generali in exchange for a 16.75 per cent stake in Generali Investments Holding, Gestion de Fortune reported, setting up a long-term asset-management partnership. In December 2014 Cathay Life also took a 22.7 per cent stake in the Philippine lender Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation, Chinese Wikipedia says.

Service is a recurring theme. The company says it introduced a customer-service chatbot, Alpha, in 2018, and in November 2026 Commercial Times (工商時報) reported that Cathay Life had won the top prize for large contact centres at ICMI’s 2026 Global Contact Center Awards. By its own account the company has sponsored outdoor performances by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre across Taiwan since 1996, and in 2016 became the first Asian life insurer to adopt the UN Principles for Sustainable Insurance voluntarily.

How Asian life insurers present themselves.

Asian life insurers tend to present themselves in a recognisable way. Wordmarks are usually short and set in warm, open sans-serif letters, often a single company name or a set of initials that can sit on an app icon, a branch fascia and a policy document without changing. Palettes lean on red, orange and blue, colours that read clearly on screens and signs, with plenty of white space around them.

Photography does much of the emotional work. Families, couples, children and older parents appear far more often than buildings or products, and health and everyday activity are recurring themes. Product pages are usually organised by need rather than by policy name: protection, savings, health and retirement, each with its own short explanation and a route to an adviser or an online quote.

Two audiences sit side by side on most of these sites. Customers are offered apps, service hotlines, online claims and, increasingly, wellness and senior-care programmes linked to their cover. Prospective agents are offered recruitment pages that describe training, career paths and the role of the adviser, since agents and partner banks remain important sales channels for many of these companies.

Behind the consumer pages sits a heavier layer of corporate publishing. Listed insurers produce annual reports, interim results and sustainability reports, often in two or more languages, and these documents carry the most formal version of the identity: the full logo, a restricted palette, long-form charts and governance pages. For a designer, studying both layers together shows how one identity stretches from a friendly app screen to a dense, regulated report.

A tree in three greens.

The identity is shared with the parent. In August 2013 Cathay Financial Holdings introduced a tree symbol in three graded greens with a new black wordmark, designed by Hsiao Wen-ping (蕭文平), and Cathay Life adopted the same tree, Chinese Wikipedia says. The Cathay name runs across the group’s bank, property insurer, securities house and fund manager, which Chinese Wikipedia lists as members of the holding company.

Sport and public programmes sit beside the tree. The company has run a women’s basketball team since 1969 and a women’s table tennis team since 2002, its milestones say, and in 2018 it began the Cathay Walker national health-promotion programme and an agent-recruitment scheme called the Young Golden Plan. In 2016, the company says, it won the sole qualification to run the long-term care project for government employees, and in 2017 it opened its first service store, in Taipei’s eastern district.

For a design guide, Cathay Life shows how one tree mark, applied across a whole financial group, can carry an insurer that began in a single Taipei office in 1962. Compare Hanwha Life, a Seoul insurer that uses its group’s symbol, and AIA, another Asian life insurer. For this guide we use three greens with a charcoal and a cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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