A development lender of 1955 and a bank of 1994.

The four letters in the ICICI Bank name are older than the bank itself. English Wikipedia says the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, or ICICI, was established on 5 January 1955 at the initiative of the World Bank, the Government of India and representatives of Indian industry, and that Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar was elected as its chairman. The bank’s own annual report for 2024–25 gives the same founding day and describes the institution as set up to provide medium and long-term finance to industry.

For almost four decades ICICI was a lender to projects rather than a bank for the public. English Wikipedia describes it as a joint venture of the World Bank, India’s public-sector banks and public-sector insurance companies, created to provide project finance to Indian industry. In the 1990s, the article says, ICICI turned itself from a development finance institution into a diversified financial services group, working directly and through a number of subsidiaries and affiliates.

The bank was one of those subsidiaries. English Wikipedia says ICICI set up ICICI Bank as a wholly owned subsidiary in 1994 in Vadodara. The 2024–25 annual report adds a detail about the name: ICICI registered ICICI Banking Corporation on 5 January 1994, the anniversary of the parent’s founding, and renamed it ICICI Bank four years later.

Over the following years the subsidiary grew through acquisitions as well as new branches. English Wikipedia lists the purchase of the Bank of Madura in 2001, Sangli Bank in 2007 and the Bank of Rajasthan in 2010, the last of which was later merged into ICICI Bank. The bank is headquartered in Mumbai, and its group includes businesses in life and general insurance, securities and asset management that carry the ICICI name alongside partner names, such as ICICI Prudential and ICICI Lombard.

A child that absorbed its parent in 2002.

The decisive change in the brand’s structure came when the subsidiary absorbed its parent. English Wikipedia says that in October 2001 the boards of ICICI and ICICI Bank approved the merger of ICICI and two of its wholly owned retail finance subsidiaries, ICICI Personal Financial Services and ICICI Capital Services, into ICICI Bank. Because the parent was merging into its own subsidiary, the deal was described as a reverse merger.

Newspapers followed the scheme through the courts. The Tribune of Chandigarh carried a Press Trust of India report on 12 April 2002 that the Mumbai High Court had approved the merger scheme and the swap ratio for the reverse merger of ICICI Ltd with ICICI Bank, with Justice D. K. Deshmukh setting aside objections raised by some shareholders of the institution. The report quoted ICICI executive director Kalpana Morparia, who said the company would now approach the Reserve Bank of India for its approval, and it gave the effective date of the merger as 30 March 2002.

The result was a single brand where there had been two. Before 2002 the ICICI name belonged to a development institution with a banking subsidiary; afterwards it belonged to the bank. The 2024–25 annual report describes the 2002 merger as combining a legacy in development finance with a new private-sector bank, and its timeline simply records that ICICI Limited merged with ICICI Bank that year.

Advertising for the bank was handled by outside agencies. afaqs! reported on 19 July 2004 that Lowe, Mumbai, had won the advertising account of ICICI Bank’s retail banking business after a multi-agency pitch. Pranesh Misra, then president and chief operating officer of Lowe, told the publication that the agency’s role was to manage and drive the acquisition of customers into the ICICI Bank brand. The same report noted that Lowe already handled the life insurance brand ICICI Prudential.

Eight years later the bank’s voice had a new line. afaqs! reported on 23 October 2012 that ICICI Bank had released a new film made by Ogilvy Mumbai that fell under the broad brand thought “Khayal Aapka”, a Hindi phrase that translates roughly as “caring for you”.

Indian and Chinese company marks.

Company brands from India and China often carry their history in the name itself. Many Indian groups are named after a founding family, and the surname on the letterhead can stand for a bank, a steel works and a soap at the same time. In that setting a logo has to work across very different businesses, so the identity tends to lean on one wordmark, one colour and a consistent way of setting the family name rather than on a single product picture.

Chinese internet and retail companies grew up with two names: a Chinese name in characters and a Latin-letter name for domains, app stores and overseas markets. Some began with a pinyin spelling, some shortened a long name to a few letters, and some changed their Latin name entirely as they moved beyond their home market. Each rename has to keep the visual memory of the old mark while making the new one easy to read.

Mascots and uniforms do a lot of the work. A cartoon animal can appear on an app icon, a parcel and a billboard, and a delivery rider’s jacket, helmet and box turn a city street into a moving sign. For designers, these everyday surfaces are where the colour and the character of a company brand are seen most often.

From an industrial gear to a letter i.

The bank has told the story of its own symbol. Its annual report for 2024–25, published for the seventieth year of the institution, includes a spread headed “The Evolution of a Legacy: ICICI Bank’s Logo Through the Years”, and every description below is the bank’s own account. The mark used from 1959 to 1963 was circular and stamp-like, which the bank says was meant to suggest a seal of approval. An industrial gear sat at its core to signal the focus on industrial development, it was coloured blue for reliability, and an outer ring of slanted lines stood for forward movement.

The gear stayed for years. The report says the logo of 1964 to 1966 kept it and added hexagons, for openness and transparency, and a globe, for links with international markets. The version of 1967 to 1968 was driven by typography and spelled out the full name of the institution in place of the abbreviation, still with the gear and globe. From 1969 to 1971, during the Green Revolution, the logo turned green to highlight agricultural lending, and an italicised lowercase “icici” wordmark was meant to suggest motion and energy. The mark of 1972 to 1980 took a more geometric form, and the gear returned.

Two lines of logos then ran side by side. The report says the logo used by ICICI Limited from 1981 to 1998 was meant to show an individual becoming a global citizen through industrialisation. The new bank had its own mark from 1994 to 1998, a circular spiral that reflected the aim of building a universal bank, with an upward flame for reach and diversification and brighter colours for confidence.

The present symbol grew out of a change in 1998. The bank says a sleeker design with a dynamic ‘i’ appeared that year, standing for a driven, self-assured individual, and that the current logo builds on that letter and on the bank’s orange and maroon palette. In the bank’s words, orange reflects dynamism, maroon conveys warmth and white stands for ethics and trust.

For a design guide, ICICI Bank shows how an institution can keep its four-letter name for seventy years while the picture beside it moves from heavy industry to a single letter. Compare HDFC Bank, another Indian bank, and Aditya Birla, an Indian group brand. For this guide we use orange, maroon and deep maroon with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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