A bank and an insurer, 1991.

ING is a set of initials. They stand for Internationale Nederlanden Groep, the International Netherlands Group, formed when the banking business of NMB Postbank Groep and the insurance business of Nationale-Nederlanden merged in 1991, according to Wikipedia. The merger was completed on 4 March 1991, after a 1990 change in Dutch financial law allowed banks and insurers to combine. Aad Jacobs chaired the new group, which is headquartered in Amsterdam.

Both halves of the name had long histories. On the insurance side, De Nederlanden van 1845 was founded as a fire insurer on 12 April 1845, and the Nationale Levensverzekerings Bank was founded in Rotterdam in 1863. The two merged on 3 April 1963 to form Nationale-Nederlanden, which introduced an orange N logo in 1970, Wikipedia says. Its predecessors reach back further still, to a burial fund founded in 1743 in Koog aan de Zaan by nine local men.

The banking side came from the state and the high street. The Rijkspostspaarbank, a postal savings bank, was created in April 1881 to let ordinary Dutch people save through the post-office network. The Postcheque- en Girodienst followed in 1918 as part of the state telecommunications company PTT, giving working families and small firms giro payment services. In 1986 the two were combined as Postbank, which the government privatised in 1987. Separately, the Nederlandsche Middenstands Bank, or NMB, was created in 1927 through the merger of several institutions to lend to middle-class and small businesses. Postbank and NMB merged in 1989 as NMB Postbank Groep, two years before the deal that produced ING.

The giro side had its own Amsterdam strand. The municipally run Gemeentegiro Amsterdam, set up around 1916, issued plastic payment cards in 1961 and installed a cash machine in the Bijlmermeer district in 1969, and the Postcheque- en Girodienst took it over in 1979, Wikipedia says. In 1986 Postbank introduced Girotel, an electronic home banking system. The ING initials sat on top of all of these names, and Postbank and Nationale-Nederlanden continued in use beneath them.

From blue to orange.

The ING symbol is a lion, and it came with the bank side of the merger. Wikipedia says the logo alludes to Dutch symbolism used by several of ING’s predecessors, including Postbank, and that the group’s original blue lion was refreshed in 2000 and replaced by an orange version between 2007 and 2009. The Dutch-language Wikipedia gives the same sequence.

The change of colour was tied to a change of name. On 16 May 2007, DutchNews.nl reported that ING Group had announced that Postbank would be merged into the ING bank network by 2009. ING said it had chosen to focus on the ING brand because the name was already known internationally. The cost of the changeover, DutchNews reported, would go largely on advertising to familiarise customers and on refitting bank branches with the new logo. The familiar blue Postbank lion would survive the change, the report said, but it would become orange.

The two sides of the 1991 merger each brought a visual element to that result: the lion from the Postbank side, and orange, which Nationale-Nederlanden had used for its N logo since 1970.

The new single brand launched on 10 February 2009, according to Wikipedia, completing the merger of Postbank and ING Bank in the Netherlands under one name. The Postbank name, used by the state savings and giro bank since 1986, left the Dutch high street. Its lion stayed on, in orange, as the ING symbol.

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.

Barings, ING Direct and a return to banking.

The ING name travelled through acquisitions. In 1995 the group bought Barings, the London merchant bank founded in 1762, after its collapse, and the business became ING Barings, Wikipedia says. In 2001 ING sold the US operations of ING Barings to ABN AMRO.

The group also took the direct banking model it had developed with NMB Postbank abroad. The earliest of these operations was set up in Canada in 1997 as ING Bank of Canada, and others followed in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and Australia, according to Wikipedia. Several were later sold: ING Direct in Canada went to Scotiabank, which trades it as Tangerine, and ING Direct UK went to Barclays in 2012.

The insurance half was separated again. In October 2009 ING announced that its insurance arm would be split from the group, Wikipedia says. The spun-off North American insurance businesses were renamed Voya Financial in 2014, and in April 2016 ING sold its last shares in NN Group, making it a bank again rather than a bank and insurer.

The group also carries a visual heritage beyond its logo. Its art collection began in 1974, when NMB Bank started collecting contemporary figurative Dutch art, and it grew with each merger: Postbank brought abstract works in 1989, Nationale-Nederlanden brought Hague School and French art in 1991, and Barings brought British works by artists including Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer and L. S. Lowry, which are housed at ING’s London offices, Wikipedia says. What ING kept from the 1991 deal and the 2009 rebrand is a short name, the lion from the bank side and orange.

For a design guide, ING shows how a merger name can become a brand in its own right, and how a symbol can change colour without changing shape. Compare Barclays, which bought ING Direct UK, and BNP Paribas, another European bank name formed by merger. For this guide we use orange, a burnt orange and an indigo ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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