Colonial First State Brand Guidelines: A 1988 State Bank Fund Manager, CBA & KKR

A state bank’s fund manager.

Colonial First State began inside a government-owned bank. In 1988 the State Bank of New South Wales set up a fund-management subsidiary under the First State name, English Wikipedia says; the article on its former asset-management arm, now First Sentier Group, gives the name as First State Fund Managers. CFS itself says it has helped more than three million Australians with their investment, superannuation and retirement needs “since 1988.”

The Colonial part of the name came with a change of owner. In 1994 Colonial Mutual bought the State Bank of New South Wales from the New South Wales government, and on 23 September 1996 the merged business was rebranded Colonial State Bank, with the fund manager branded Colonial First State, English Wikipedia says. Colonial demutualised in 1997. In 2000 the Commonwealth Bank of Australia bought Colonial and merged the Colonial State Bank division into its own business, while Colonial First State kept its name.

Under the Commonwealth Bank the brand divided in two. The investment-management arm was branded Colonial First State Global Asset Management in Australia and First State Investments elsewhere; it was bought by Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking in 2019 and renamed First Sentier Investors in 2020, and First Sentier Group in 2025, English Wikipedia says. The Colonial First State name stayed with the superannuation, pension and investment business that serves members directly, through employers and through financial advisers.

FirstChoice, FirstWrap and Edge.

CFS’s products carry a family of names. Its main superannuation and pension ranges are FirstChoice and FirstWrap, for which its trustee, Avanteos Investments Limited, is responsible, the company says. In July 2025 CFS reported that FirstChoice had ranked first among Australian wealth platforms in the 2025 Wealth Insights Service Level Report, a survey of financial advisers, and first for technical support for the 13th year in a row. Its newer adviser platform, CFS Edge, launched on 1 August 2023 and was developed with advisers and the platform-technology company FNZ, CFS said in May 2024, adding that it launched with more than 550 managed funds and over 160 exchange-traded funds, with access to 16 stock exchanges and trading in 11 currencies.

On its website the company groups the offer simply into super, investments and retirement, with separate paths for customers, advisers, employers and self-managed super funds. Its pages cover account-based pensions, transition to retirement, insurance in super, calculators and a Retirement Income Optimiser, and its investment range includes ready-made portfolios and a sustainable growth option it calls Thrive+. Its website and media releases use both the full name, Colonial First State, and the short form CFS, which also prefixes newer products such as CFS Edge.

English Wikipedia also records a climate commitment that CFS has announced: alignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement, with a target of net zero emissions by 2050 for its investment portfolios and a 30 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 levels along the way.

Design and documentation.

Australian superannuation funds and wealth firms present themselves to members as much as to the public, and a fund’s identity has to work inside an account as well as in an advertisement: on a login screen, in an app, on a yearly statement and in an annual report. The funds in this guide tend to use friendly sans-serif wordmarks, and their palettes often reach for teal, purple, orange and navy.

Their language is member-first. Industry funds describe themselves as run for members, and many carry their origins in their names: a trade, a sector, a state or an employer. Mergers have blurred those names over time, and several funds now carry names that no longer point to a single industry or state. Their websites often say which workers a fund was set up for, even after it has opened to everyone.

The pictures follow the same idea. Fund websites and reports tend to show members at work and at home in everyday settings rather than buildings or products. The pages themselves are practical: what super is, how to join or combine accounts, retirement income, insurance in super, and member tools such as calculators and retirement planners, with annual reports and governance pages for those who look further.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each fund or firm: when it was founded, how it merged, who owns or runs it, and how regulators have dealt with it, with figures for members and assets given only as a dated source states them. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, and no logo or mark is reproduced.

From the Commonwealth Bank to KKR.

On 13 May 2020 the Commonwealth Bank announced an agreement to sell a 55% interest in CFS to the global investment firm KKR, describing CFS’s member base at the time as more than one million Australians. The bank announced on 1 December 2021 that the sale had completed, and CFS has operated as a standalone company since then. CFS says it is majority owned (55%) by an affiliate of KKR, with the Commonwealth Bank holding a significant minority interest (45%).

Its regulatory record runs through the same years. The Commonwealth Bank’s distribution of Colonial’s Essential Super product was a case study at the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry and was referred to ASIC, which began civil penalty proceedings against both companies on 22 June 2020; the Federal Court dismissed them on 29 September 2022, and the Full Federal Court dismissed ASIC’s appeal, ASIC said on 17 August 2023, adding that the judgment had clarified the meaning and reach of the conflicted remuneration provisions for future matters. ASIC said Essential Super had been distributed to more than 390,000 people. In a separate case, ASIC announced on 20 October 2021 that the Federal Court had ordered Colonial First State Investments Limited, as trustee of the FirstChoice fund, to pay a penalty for misleading members about the transfer of their contributions into a MySuper product; the court noted the company’s consent to the declarations and its remediation program. It also ordered Colonial to publish an adverse publicity notice and to pay ASIC’s costs, and ASIC said Colonial had remediated losses for 5,815 members who had received such calls.

For a design guide, Colonial First State shows how a name built from two older institutions, a state bank and a mutual insurer, can be shortened to three letters while keeping both in its history. Compare Commonwealth Bank, its owner from 2000 and still a minority shareholder, and AMP, another Sydney wealth group with a mutual past. For this guide we use a deep teal, slate and a soft mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Colonial First State’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.