Interbank Brand Guidelines: Lima 1897, Intercorp, Supermarket Branches & a Hollein Tower

A Lima bank on the Jirón de la Unión.

Interbank is the trading name of the Banco Internacional del Perú. Spanish Wikipedia dates its founding to 1 May 1897 in Lima, with its first office in what is now the Casa O’Higgins on the Jirón de la Unión, in the historic centre. English Wikipedia credits Elías Mujica with opening it, and Spanish Wikipedia names Elías Mujica Carassa as the first chairman of its board, followed by his brothers. Branches opened in Chiclayo and Arequipa in 1934 and in Piura and Sullana a year later, the Spanish article says.

Ownership changed several times in the twentieth century. In 1944, according to Spanish Wikipedia, the International Petroleum Company took control of the bank, which reached an agreement with Chemical Bank New York Trust in 1967. A 1968 law required 75 per cent of bank shares to pass to Peruvian investors by December 1969, and in 1970 the state-owned Banco de la Nación bought the bank’s shares, after which it formed part of the group of state-associated banks. In 1980 it adopted the name InterBanc.

Privatisation came in July 1994, when Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor Mendoza, with a group of United States investors, bought about 91 per cent of the shares, Spanish Wikipedia says; the rest went to some of the bank’s employees. English Wikipedia dates the Intercorp group to the same year. The name Interbank followed in the mid-1990s — Spanish Wikipedia gives 1996, while English Wikipedia’s Intercorp article says InterBanc was used until 1997 — together with a more personal style of customer service.

Stores, supermarkets and a leaning tower.

Interbank today belongs to Intercorp, a Peruvian conglomerate that English Wikipedia says works mainly through two holding companies, Intercorp Financial Services and Intercorp Retail. Intercorp Financial Services, created in a 2006 restructuring and incorporated in Panama, controls Interbank together with the insurer Interseguro and the wealth manager Inteligo, and does its business in Peru, according to English Wikipedia. Other group names it lists include the supermarket chains plazaVea and Vivanda, the department store Oechsle and the cinema chain Cineplanet. Spanish Wikipedia says figures from Peru’s banking regulator, the SBS, made Interbank the country’s third-largest bank in 2024.

Retail is built into the bank’s identity. English Wikipedia says that part of its strategy after 1994 was to open branches inside supermarkets so customers could shop and bank in one trip, and that in 2004 Interbank bought the Santa Isabel supermarket chain from Ahold and founded Supermercados Peruanos; it keeps offices inside Vivanda and Plaza Vea stores. Its branches are called “tiendas”, or stores, and its cash machines run under the GlobalNet name. In 2007, the same article says, it opened a business office in Shanghai to help trade between China and Peru.

The most visible part of the brand is architectural. The Edificio Interbank, the head office in Santa Catalina, in Lima’s La Victoria district, opened on 30 January 2001, Spanish Wikipedia says. It was designed by the Austrian architect Hans Hollein and built by the Peruvian contractor Cosapi between 1996 and 2000. Its 20-storey tower leans like a “sail in the wind,” with a titanium mesh across its front that carries lights which change from the bank’s colour to festive colours on special days; the base facing the street is clad in volcanic stone from the Andes, after the tradition of Inca building, the article says. The tower rises to about 88 to 90 metres and is topped by a helipad. English Wikipedia says Intercorp has its headquarters in the same building.

How the category presents itself.

Latin American banks tend to present themselves through bold wordmarks and a small set of strong colours. Blues, reds, greens and yellows recur across the region’s banking brands, usually paired with a short name or acronym that has to work on a branch front, a debit card and an app icon alike. Many names are Spanish and carry a place, a nation or a founding purpose in them, and slogans are written for a home audience first.

Photography does much of the work. Bank websites and reports in the region often show branches, city streets and customers rather than abstract imagery, and some banks make a landmark headquarters building part of their public face. Financial-inclusion programmes — accounts for people new to banking, credit for small businesses, scholarships — are a recurring theme, presented alongside the core pages on accounts, cards, loans, remittances and mobile apps.

Sponsorship is another constant. Football leagues, stadiums and clubs carry bank names in several countries, and banks also run cultural foundations, art collections and exhibitions that put the brand in a setting far from the branch counter.

The paper trail matters too. Listed banks and the subsidiaries of international groups publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and these, together with dated press coverage and public histories, are what this guide draws on. Each entry sets out who founded the bank, who owns it now and how its name has changed, and marks what rests only on the bank’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown here are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own specifications.

From piggy banks to a shared wallet.

Digital payments are now part of the brand. In the 2020s, Spanish Wikipedia says, Interbank joined Plin, a digital wallet operated with BBVA and Scotiabank that can exchange payments with Yape wallets; it also developed the Tunki wallet, which now serves businesses as IzipayYA.

That system was tested in late 2024. On 30 October 2024 customers reported problems reaching the Interbank app and Plin, and the bank confirmed that some data from a group of customers had been exposed by a third party without its authorisation, Gestión reported on 3 November 2024. The banking regulator, the SBS, began an on-site supervision to gather information and said it would determine whether any information-security or cybersecurity rules had been broken; customer complaints were handled by Indecopi, the consumer and competition authority. On 9 November 2024 Diario Correo reported the regulator as saying that no extortion complaints had been registered and that no date had been set for its report.

Brand names have been contested too. In October 2024 Infobae reported that Indecopi had cancelled Interbank’s “El Chanchito Millonario” savings mark at the request of Banco de Crédito del Perú, because use in the previous three years had not been shown; Interbank had said it used the mark continuously since 1997, handing customers pig-shaped money boxes and advertising its Cuenta Millonaria with a piggy bank. Indecopi then registered the “Mi Chanchito BCP” mark over Interbank’s opposition, the report said.

For a design guide, Interbank shows how a bank can borrow the language of retail — stores, supermarket counters and a landmark tower — to present itself. Compare BBVA, its partner in Plin, and BancoEstado, Chile’s state bank. For this guide we use a deep green, a fresh green and a navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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