İşbank Brand Guidelines: Ankara 1924, the Bankamatik & a Bank Art Collection

Founded on Atatürk’s initiative in Ankara.

İşbank, officially Türkiye İş Bankası A.Ş., was founded on 26 August 1924 on the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. English Wikipedia calls it the first bank to go into operation in the Republic; Turkish Wikipedia calls it the first national bank of the republican period. Turkish Wikipedia says it followed a resolution of the İzmir Economic Congress calling for a national bank with large capital, and that it began work in Ankara with a single branch and a small staff under Celâl Bayar, its first general manager. An Istanbul branch opened at the end of 1924, and branches in İzmir and Bursa in 1925.

Atatürk provided part of the founding capital, and 36 other founders who had paid at least a tenth of the capital they pledged joined him, Turkish Wikipedia says. In 1927 the bank merged with the İtibar-ı Milli Bankası, the National Credit Bank, and enlarged its capital.

From the start it invested as well as lent. Turkish Wikipedia says it took stakes in sugar, glass and textiles, and in mines, ports and coal works. It led the founding of the insurer Anadolu Sigorta on 8 March 1925 and, in 1935, of the glassmaker Şişecam, which is still part of the İşbank group. In 1928 it brought the first piggy banks to Turkey, as part of its aim of gathering small savings, and in 1932 it opened branches in Hamburg and Alexandria, becoming the first Turkish bank with branches abroad, both Wikipedias say.

Bankamatik, a publisher and a painting collection.

İşbank’s record of Turkish banking firsts runs through its channels. In 1982, English Wikipedia says, it introduced the first automated teller machines in Turkey, called them “Bankamatik” and registered the name as a trademark. It launched the “Mavi Hat” (Blue Line) telephone service in 1991 and its first internet branch in 1997. In May 2021 the bank announced that it had become the first Turkish bank to give a payment guarantee in foreign trade using blockchain, through the Marco Polo platform, in a transaction involving Şişecam, Kuraray and Commerzbank, the Hürriyet Daily News reported.

Culture is a large part of the brand. The publisher Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları was founded in 1956 by Hasan Âli Yücel, the former education minister, to carry on publishing world classics in Turkish; its Hasan Âli Yücel Classics series began in 2006 with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and now runs to more than 450 titles, Turkish Wikipedia says. The bank’s arts activities were gathered under the İş Sanat name in 2000, beginning with a concert at the cultural centre in the İş Kuleleri (İş Towers) in November that year, and İş Sanat became a separate company in 2017; it runs the Türkiye İş Bankası Museum, the Museum of Economic Independence and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture.

The art collection sits at the centre of that programme. In September 2021 the Hürriyet Daily News reported that a historic former branch on İstiklal Avenue in Istanbul, registered as a cultural property, was being restored as a painting museum for the collection, which then held more than 2,500 works by more than 950 artists, from Osman Hamdi Bey to Şeker Ahmet Paşa. In July 2025 the same paper reported a touring show, “Art for Everyone: Anatolian Exhibitions,” which opened in the painter İbrahim Çallı’s home district of Çal, in Denizli, with six of his works shown at İşbank’s Çal branch; İş Sanat said the bank’s branches had once housed small galleries, an idea it planned to revive.

How Turkish banks present themselves.

Turkish banks tend to present themselves through bold, simple wordmarks and one dominant colour. Across the country’s large lenders the palettes run through greens, reds, blues and purples, and the names keep their Turkish letters — the dotted capital İ, the ş, the ı and the ğ — on logos, apps and branch signs, so a typeface that handles those diacritics cleanly belongs in any design brief for the sector.

Advertising is a large part of how these brands are known at home. Mascots, recurring characters and campaigns led by well-known actors and athletes appear across the sector, alongside photography of branches, city streets and Istanbul itself. On their websites the banks arrange themselves around everyday tasks: accounts, loans, credit cards and loyalty programmes, and mobile apps that sit at the front of most pages.

Sponsorship and culture extend the identity. Turkish banks sponsor football, concerts and festivals, and some run publishers, galleries, museums or art collections under their own names; İşbank’s publishing house and painting collection, and the SALT institution that grew out of Garanti BBVA’s Ottoman Bank archive, are two documented examples covered in this series.

The banks also publish a great deal of formal material. Listed lenders produce annual and integrated reports, sustainability reports and investor presentations in Turkish and English. This series sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it and how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on a bank’s own word.

A staff fund, a free float and the Atatürk shares.

İşbank’s ownership is unusual among Turkish banks. In May 1998, English Wikipedia says, 12.3% of its shares, previously held by the Turkish Treasury, were sold to domestic and international investors in a public offering. Its shares trade on Borsa İstanbul, with depositary receipts in London. According to Central Registry Agency data for 31 December 2021, cited by Turkish Wikipedia, 37.26% of the shares were held by the foundation that runs the staff pension and mutual-aid fund, 34.65% were publicly traded, and 28.09% were the shares known as the Atatürk shares, held by the Republican People’s Party under the terms of Atatürk’s will, with their dividends going to the Turkish Language Association and the Turkish Historical Society.

The group around the bank is wide. Turkish Wikipedia lists, among others, Anadolu Sigorta, Şişecam, the development and investment bank TSKB, founded in 1950, the broker İş Yatırım, the pension company Anadolu Hayat Emeklilik and İşbank AG, a German subsidiary set up in Frankfurt in 1992 with branches in Germany and the Netherlands. English Wikipedia also lists branches in Northern Cyprus, Iraq, Kosovo, the United Kingdom and Bahrain, and subsidiaries in Russia and Georgia; in late 2023 the bank operated 1,066 domestic branches, according to a report it cites.

Like several of its peers, İşbank has faced the competition regulator. On 8 March 2013 Turkey’s Competition Board fined twelve banks, İşbank among them, after finding that they had adopted anti-competitive policies on loan rates and credit card services, the Hürriyet Daily News reported.

For a design guide, İşbank shows how a bank can carry its name through institutions as well as branches: a publisher, museums and an art collection sit beside the cash machines it named in 1982. Compare Garanti BBVA, whose SALT institution grew out of a bank archive, and Akbank, another Turkish bank in this series. For this guide we use a deep blue, a muted gold and a pale sky with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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