FirstRand Brand Guidelines: An 1838 Bank, a 1998 Group & Three Separate Brands

A young group with an old bank inside it.

FirstRand is a young company with an old bank inside it. The group was formed on 1 April 1998 by merging the financial services interests of Anglo American and RMB Holdings: First National Bank Holdings, the insurer Momentum and Southern Life. Momentum was renamed FirstRand Limited and listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on 25 May 1998, English Wikipedia says; Rand Merchant Bank and FNB were then merged into FirstRand Bank, where they continue to trade as separate divisions.

Its retail bank, First National Bank (FNB), traces its origins to the Eastern Province Bank, formed in Grahamstown in 1838 to finance the district’s wool exports, according to English Wikipedia, which calls FNB the oldest bank in South Africa. By 1874 it had four branches, in Grahamstown, Middelburg, Cradock and Queenstown; that year it passed to the Oriental Bank Corporation and then to the Bank of Africa, formed in 1879. A separate line began in Pretoria in 1891 with the Nationale Bank der Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, renamed the National Bank of South Africa in 1902, which took over the Bank of Africa in 1912 and the Natal Bank in 1914.

In 1925 the National Bank merged with the Anglo-Egyptian Bank and the Colonial Bank to form Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas), and the South African business was renamed Barclays National Bank in 1971. Barclays reduced its stake to 40.4% in 1985 and withdrew in November 1986, amid a disinvestment campaign against South Africa over apartheid, selling its local operations to Anglo American, Southern Life, De Beers and smaller shareholders. The bank was renamed First National Bank of Southern Africa on 30 September 1987, English Wikipedia says.

FNB, RMB and WesBank.

FirstRand presents itself as a portfolio of separately branded businesses rather than as a single bank brand. On its website the group lists FNB for retail and commercial banking in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa, RMB for corporate and investment banking in South Africa, the rest of Africa and India, WesBank for instalment credit and fleet management, and Aldermore, a UK specialist lender and savings bank that includes the vehicle financier MotoNovo.

Rand Merchant Bank was set up in Johannesburg in 1968 as a subsidiary of Rand Bank. After Rand Bank ceased operations in 1977, a consortium formed by Johann Rupert and associates bought it; Rand Consolidated Investments took control in 1985, and Rand Merchant Holdings was created in 1987, English Wikipedia says. RMB opened a representative office in Nigeria in 2010, and in November 2012 the Central Bank of Nigeria issued it one of the first merchant banking licences granted there in more than a decade. FirstRand Bank opened a branch in India, managed by RMB, after receiving a licence from the Reserve Bank of India in 2009, and in July 2020 the group’s asset manager, Ashburton Investments, was folded into RMB, English Wikipedia says.

WesBank began as Western Bank, formed in 1968 by merging Colonial Bank & Trust and Western Credit, both already in motor finance. Anglo American sold it to Barclays in 1975; it took the WesBank name in 1978 and became a division of FNB after Barclays left in 1986. Its moves since include buying the Welsh car financier Carlyle Finance in 2006, later renamed MotoNovo and folded into Aldermore in 2019, and finance partnerships with carmakers, including a 2013 joint venture with Great Wall Motors, according to English Wikipedia. In 2020 it launched the WesBank App for applying for and signing vehicle finance digitally; a year later the app’s functions were moved into the FNB banking app.

How African banks present themselves.

African banks speak to very different audiences at once: city professionals and market traders, multinational companies and small farms, customers with a branch on the corner and customers whose nearest branch is a long journey away. Their identities tend to reflect that range. Bold geometric marks, simple enough to read on a branch sign, a card or a phone screen, sit alongside palettes built on strong blues, reds and greens.

Photography carries much of the message. Annual reports and campaign pages often pair city skylines with everyday customers photographed across the continent, from shop owners and farmers to students and young families. Many groups also publish footprint maps that show where they operate, a visual shorthand for a pan-African presence that may run through subsidiaries trading under different local names.

Digital channels have become a central part of the brand. Bank websites give prominent space to mobile apps and to USSD menus, the short dial codes that work on basic phones without data, alongside pages for small-business banking and agriculture lending programmes. The tone on these pages is usually practical, written to explain how to open an account, send money or apply for credit.

Reporting is the other half of the identity. Large banking groups publish integrated, sustainability and financial-inclusion reports, and these documents often carry the most considered typography and photography a bank produces. This guide looks at each brand’s history and what can be checked about how it presents itself, and treats the colours and type shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than official brand assets.

A holding company behind its divisions.

FirstRand is headquartered in Johannesburg and listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Namibian Stock Exchange. According to its website, as at June 2023 it had subsidiaries in eight African countries beyond South Africa, from Botswana and Namibia to Ghana and Nigeria, branches in London, Guernsey and India, and representative offices in Kenya, Angola, Shanghai and New York. In 2022 its Tanzanian bank was acquired by Exim Bank Tanzania, English Wikipedia says.

HSBC announced in September 2024 that it would leave South Africa and agreed to move its Johannesburg branch’s clients, assets, liabilities and staff to FirstRand Bank. Business News South Africa reported in October 2026 that the transfer was largely complete by May 2026, and that the Reserve Bank had withdrawn the HSBC branch’s authorisation with effect from 18 September 2026.

In Britain, FirstRand’s London branch, trading as MotoNovo Finance, was one of the lenders in the car-finance commission cases decided by the UK Supreme Court on 1 August 2025. The court allowed the lenders’ appeals on the bribery and fiduciary claims, but held that one customer was entitled to succeed in a claim that his relationship with the lender had been unfair under the Consumer Credit Act, according to the court’s press summary.

For a design guide, FirstRand shows how a holding company can stay in the background while its divisions carry their own names. Compare Barclays, which owned FNB’s predecessor until 1986, and Standard Bank, another Johannesburg group with nineteenth-century roots. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm gold and a stone grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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