Industrial Bank Brand Guidelines: Fuzhou 1988, a 2007 Listing & Green Finance

A provincial finance house becomes a bank.

Industrial Bank began in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province on China’s south-east coast. English Wikipedia says the State Council and the People’s Bank of China approved its establishment on 26 August 1988, and Chinese Wikipedia describes it as one of the first group of joint-stock commercial banks approved by those two bodies. It traded at first as Fujian Industrial Bank. Its Chinese name, 兴业银行 (Xingye Yinhang), has stayed in place through every later change of its English and legal name.

The bank did not start from nothing. Chinese Wikipedia, citing the Fujian provincial gazetteer, traces its roots to Fujian Fuxing Finance Company, a non-bank financial company set up in December 1981. When the bank was formed in August 1988, it was sponsored by three enterprises owned by the province: Fuxing Finance Company, Fujian Investment Enterprise Company and Fujian Huaxing Investment Company. No individual founder is named; the founders were institutions.

For its first years the bank was a Fujian business. Chinese Wikipedia dates its first branch outside the province to 20 March 1996, when it opened in Shanghai. Shenzhen followed in 1998 and Guangzhou in 2000. From 2001 it entered Zhejiang by buying local financial institutions, opening branches in cities such as Yiwu, Wenzhou and Taizhou. In March 2003 the company dropped “Fujian” from its name and became Industrial Bank Co., Ltd., announcing at the same time that its conversion to a shareholding structure was complete.

A further step came in 2004. Chinese Wikipedia says the banking regulator approved, on 28 September that year, a cross-province merger with the city commercial bank of Foshan in Guangdong, which became the bank’s Foshan branch and opened in December 2004. The same article describes it as the first case of a national joint-stock bank taking over a city commercial bank.

A strategic partner, a listing and a green turn.

The early 2000s also brought an outside shareholder. Chinese Wikipedia says Hang Seng Bank of Hong Kong bought into Industrial Bank in 2004, taking 15.98 per cent of the enlarged share capital, and joined a rights issue in 2010. Three years after Hang Seng arrived, on 5 February 2007, Industrial Bank listed its shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, under the code 601166, according to both English and Chinese Wikipedia.

That partnership wound down in 2015. Chinese Wikipedia records a first placement of shares by Hang Seng in February 2015. The Business Times of Singapore, carrying a Bloomberg report in May 2015, said Hang Seng Bank, “the Hong Kong lender controlled by HSBC Holdings,” would sell a second stake in the Fuzhou bank and keep only 0.88 per cent afterwards, using the proceeds to support its own expansion. The same report described Industrial Bank as based in the southern Chinese city of Fuzhou. Industrial Bank now says on its website that the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the wholly state-funded Fujian Financial Investment Co., Ltd. are its largest consolidated shareholders.

The bank’s clearest public theme is green finance. English Wikipedia says it adopted the Equator Principles, a voluntary framework for weighing environmental and social risk in project finance, in 2008, and Chinese Wikipedia calls it mainland China’s first “Equator bank.” English Wikipedia adds that green finance has been treated as a core business since 2015 and that climate and ESG factors sit inside its risk management. The bank’s own green-banking page describes green bonds issued at home and abroad, carbon-finance services built with partners such as the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange, and loans tied to forest rights, water rights, forestry and the tea industry.

The group is larger than its branch network. English Wikipedia lists a wholly owned leasing company, Industrial Financial Leasing, and a controlling stake in Union Trust, and says head-office units for credit cards, retail banking, private banking, asset custody and investment banking operate from Shanghai and Beijing. Chinese Wikipedia says its first overseas branch opened in Hong Kong, and that it holds correspondent relationships with banks around the world.

How Chinese banks present themselves.

China’s large banks present themselves to two audiences at once. Most carry a Chinese name and an English one, and many shorten the English to initials, so a single identity has to work in Chinese characters, in Latin letters and in a short acronym on cards, apps and branch fronts. Red and blue dominate the sector’s colours, and marks are often built around Chinese characters or around round forms that recall coins and seals, though the meaning of a particular mark should be checked against the bank’s own account rather than assumed.

Much of the visual record comes from the banks’ own channels. Their websites set out a mission, a motto and a list of values, usually in both languages, and divide services into retail or personal banking, corporate banking, inclusive finance for small businesses and wealth management. Branch photography, with signage over glass frontages and service halls, is a staple of annual reports and investor pages.

The phone has become a second front door. The big banks run mobile-banking apps and, in several cases, separate lifestyle or payments apps, and they report online user numbers alongside branch counts. Many also link their cards to UnionPay, the national card network.

The paper trail is long and dated. Banks listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong publish annual reports, interim results and ESG reports in Chinese and English, and several issue green bonds or publish separate green-finance reports. For design research, those documents give dated, citable evidence of how an identity is applied, from cover design to typography and photography, and they are the most reliable place to check a claim about a bank’s name, history or scale.

One name in Chinese, two sets of initials in English.

In English the bank appears under more than one short form. Its website sits at cib.com.cn and greets visitors with “Welcome to CIB,” while its menus refer to the company as “IB.” The Chinese name is the anchor: 兴业银行 is the form used in the Shanghai listing and in Chinese-language reporting. The same two characters, Xingye, also appear in the Chinese names of other, unrelated banks, and Chinese Wikipedia keeps separate entries for them, so the full name and the Fuzhou base are the reliable way to tell this lender apart.

The bank states its values in short Chinese phrases rather than slogans in English. Chinese Wikipedia gives its mission as 真诚服务 共同兴业, which can be rendered as “sincere service, prospering together,” and its vision as 一流银行 百年兴业, roughly “a first-class bank, a century of prosperity” (translations ours). Both lines end with 兴业, the two characters of the bank’s own name. Its website, in turn, groups its services into green banking, wealth banking and investment banking channels.

For a design guide, Industrial Bank shows how a regional lender can carry a provincial origin into a national identity while making one theme, green finance, its public signature. Compare the HSBC brand guidelines, whose group once owned part of the bank through Hang Seng, and the China Merchants Bank brand guidelines for another joint-stock lender founded in the 1980s. For this guide we use Min River navy, harbour ink and tea-hill green with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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