Shenton Way, 1968.

DBS began as a government project. The Development Bank of Singapore Limited was established on 16 July 1968 to take over the industrial financing work of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and it began operations on 1 September 1968, according to Wikipedia. Its job at the outset was to finance the city-state’s industrialisation and the government’s urban development projects.

The idea was older than the bank. In 1960, Wikipedia says, the government invited a United Nations industrial survey mission to assess Singapore’s economy, and the mission’s proposals included a development bank alongside a body to attract foreign investment. In April 1968 the finance minister, Goh Keng Swee, set out plans for a development bank with equity from the public as well as the state. When it opened, its shareholders included the government, commercial banks, insurance companies and members of the public.

The bank’s full name described that mission plainly: a bank for development, belonging to Singapore. The initials DBS were the short form from the start, and over the following decades they carried more and more of the brand. The bank’s headquarters, its logo and eventually its legal name would all be organised around those three letters and the building that housed them.

That building came early. In 1969, a year after the bank was established, DBS commissioned the Singapore practice Architects Team 3 to design a headquarters on Shenton Way, in the central business district, according to the archive catalogue of the M+ museum in Hong Kong, which holds the architects’ material on the project. The catalogue dates the building to 1969–1975. The architects proposed three superstructures of different heights on what had been three plots, to soften the building’s impact on the skyline, and tested the design with study models on a site of reclaimed land.

A logo drawn from foundations.

The DBS logo has its roots underground. The square tower of the Shenton Way headquarters rests on a reinforced-concrete structure carried by four L-shaped corner elements, and its foundations relied on four caissons, the M+ catalogue says; those four caissons, it adds, also inspired the bank’s logo.

Wikipedia dates the mark to 1972. It describes the logo as a cluster of four inward-pointing red arrows set on white, shaped after the caissons of the former headquarters, the DBS Building on Shenton Way. The bank’s own heritage pages tell the same story, saying the logo was modelled on the caissons of the building’s foundation and made its debut in 1972.

The origin puts a piece of civil engineering at the centre of the brand. The caissons were the deep supports beneath a tall tower on reclaimed land, and the logo turns their plan, four forms around a shared centre, into a flat red symbol on white.

The building itself, as the M+ catalogue describes it, was clad in semi-glazed ceramic tiles and glass, with the sides of the tower chamfered inward at several points to emphasise its height. A podium of three to seven storeys underneath held a street-level pedestrian plaza, shops, an auditorium, an exhibition centre and a rooftop restaurant. The archive also holds photographs of the model, renderings of the tower against the Shenton Way skyline and a record of the construction and topping-off ceremony.

DBS has since moved its headquarters to the Marina Bay Financial Centre, Wikipedia says. The red symbol shaped after the old building’s foundations has outlasted the move.

Bank names, symbols and colours.

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.

From POSB to “Live more, Bank less”.

The brand grew by absorbing another Singapore name. The Post Office Savings Bank was established on 1 January 1877 at the General Post Office Building in Raffles Place by the Straits Settlements government, and was renamed POSBank in 1990, according to Wikipedia. DBS acquired it on 16 November 1998. POSB was not folded into the DBS name; it still operates its own branches and cash machines in Singapore, and customers of either bank can use the other’s facilities, Wikipedia says.

The long name was retired in the new century. On 21 July 2003 the bank adopted the abbreviated name DBS Bank in place of The Development Bank of Singapore Limited, to reflect its role as a global bank, Wikipedia says. The initials became the whole name, and Temasek Holdings remains the bank’s controlling shareholder, Wikipedia says.

The next layer was digital and verbal. DBS launched its digibank mobile service on 15 April 2010 and its PayLah! mobile wallet in 2014, and in 2014 its leadership began a transformation programme under the line “Make Banking Joyful”, in which the bank described itself as a technology company delivering banking services, according to Wikipedia. In 2018, the bank’s 50th anniversary year, it replaced the tagline “Living, breathing Asia” with “Live more, Bank less”, Campaign Asia reported. On 18 July 2018 Marketing-Interactive reported that DBS Hong Kong had kicked off the “Live more, Bank less” rebrand, saying the campaign set out to show banking embedded in customers’ daily lives so that they could spend more time on the people and things they care about; it included free rides on two Star Ferry routes in August and support for social enterprises.

Leadership has changed hands since. In August 2024, Fintech News Singapore reported that DBS had named Tan Su Shan deputy chief executive and successor to Piyush Gupta, who was to retire as chief executive at the annual general meeting on 28 March 2025.

For a design guide, DBS Bank shows how a symbol can come from a building rather than a crest, and how a long institutional name can shrink to its initials. Compare HSBC, another bank brand built on a geometric symbol, and ING, whose name is also a set of initials. For this guide we use red, a deep red and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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