NDB Brand Guidelines: The BRICS Bank Signed at Fortaleza in 2014, Based in Shanghai

Five founders, equal shares and one vote each.

The New Development Bank, the NDB, is a multilateral development bank set up by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the BRICS countries, and headquartered in Shanghai. The bank says its purpose is to mobilise resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in its members and in other emerging markets and developing countries. English Wikipedia says it was formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, and that the idea was proposed by India at the fourth BRICS summit, held in New Delhi in 2012. The bank’s own timeline says the leaders considered the idea that year and agreed in 2013 that it was feasible; Wikipedia dates that agreement to the Durban summit of 27 March 2013.

The legal step came in Brazil. On 15 July 2014, the first day of the sixth BRICS summit in Fortaleza, the five countries signed the Agreement on the New Development Bank, Wikipedia says, and the bank’s timeline records the same signing. The members page dates the five founders’ membership to 3 July 2015, and the first meeting of the Board of Governors was held on 7 July 2015, with K. V. Kamath of India as the first president. In 2016, the bank says, it received the first instalment of paid-in capital from its founders and became fully operational. Wikipedia adds that the NDB signed a headquarters agreement with the Chinese government and the Shanghai local government on 27 February 2016, issued its first green bond in the Chinese interbank market that July and signed its first loan agreement on 21 December 2016.

The founders built equality into the capital rules. According to Wikipedia’s account of the agreement, the initial subscribed capital was divided equally among the five, each has one vote and none has a veto; the bank’s shareholding page today still shows the five founders with identical stakes. The Articles of Agreement, quoted on the members page, open membership to members of the United Nations, as both borrowing and non-borrowing members, and Wikipedia says the founders’ share of voting power can never fall below 55 percent.

Regional offices, ratings and a building of its own.

The NDB grew outward through regional offices. The bank’s timeline places its first, the Africa Regional Center in Johannesburg, in 2017, while English Wikipedia dates the Johannesburg office to 2016. The timeline then lists an Americas Regional Office in São Paulo with a sub-office in Brasília in 2019, a Eurasian Regional Centre in Moscow in 2020 and an India Regional Office in GIFT City, Gujarat, in 2022. In 2018 the bank received AA+ credit ratings from Fitch and S&P, and in 2019, it says, it began approving loans in euros, Chinese yuan, South African rand and Swiss francs as well as in US dollars.

Shanghai became a permanent home in 2021. China Daily reported on 29 September 2021 that the bank had moved the day before into a newly built 30-floor headquarters in the city, and called it “the first major multilateral organization to set up its permanent headquarters” there. The bank’s timeline records the same move under 2021, the year the board also approved its first new members.

Membership has widened in stages, and the bank separates admission from membership. Its timeline says the Board of Governors approved Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay in 2021, and China Daily reported that the first expansion was announced on 2 September 2021. The members page dates actual membership to 16 September 2021 for Bangladesh, 4 October 2021 for the United Arab Emirates, 20 February 2023 for Egypt, 19 May 2025 for Algeria and 5 June 2026 for Uzbekistan. It lists Uruguay, Colombia, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Indonesia as prospective members, admitted by the Board of Governors, which become members once they deposit their instruments of accession. The presidency has passed from Kamath to Marcos Prado Troyjo of Brazil, elected in 2020, and to Dilma Rousseff, elected in 2023 and re-elected in 2025, according to the bank.

Design and documentation.

Development banks are owned by their member countries and economies rather than by private shareholders, and their websites put that ownership up front. The Asian Development Bank lists its 69 members with the year each one joined; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank publishes a register of regional, non-regional and prospective members with their subscriptions and voting power. For these institutions the shareholder list is part of the brand, set out as openly as a logo.

Names travel in several languages. ADB’s website runs in English, Japanese and Chinese, with some country pages in other languages, and most of these lenders are known by short sets of initials that have to read the same on a loan document in one country and a project sign in another. The palettes in this group of guides lean on deep blues, greens and teals, chosen here as our own unofficial interpretations rather than official colours.

Their websites are organised around what they finance and where. ADB’s menus divide its work by region and subregional programme and separate public- from private-sector financing, which can take the form of loans, guarantees or equity; the AIIB sorts its project list by status, from proposed to approved, on hold or cancelled, and by sovereign-backed and nonsovereign-backed financing. These project databases are where a reader can follow a single road, power line or water scheme from proposal onward.

Accountability is presented as part of the same identity. ADB lists an Accountability Mechanism and Independent Evaluation among its pages; the AIIB has its Project-affected People’s Mechanism, approved in 2018. Alongside annual reports and financial statements, these evaluation pages and complaint routes are where the banks set out, in their own words, how their projects are reviewed.

Three letters and a long name.

The bank presents itself in plain institutional terms. Its site sets out six focus areas: clean energy and energy efficiency, transport infrastructure, water and sanitation, digital infrastructure, the environment and social infrastructure. It says its work follows its members’ development objectives and their commitments under the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, and its current General Strategy covers 2022 to 2026. The same site gives space to independent evaluation, transparency and reporting, credit ratings and bond programmes, along with a BRICS-NDB knowledge portal.

The name is short and general. English Wikipedia says the institution was once referred to as the BRICS Development Bank; the name it carries, New Development Bank, names no country or region, and the bank uses the three initials NDB across its site, from the members and shareholding pages to the names of its regional offices. The bank describes itself on its homepage as established by the five BRICS countries, and its history page says the 2021 admissions marked the beginning of its expansion as a global multilateral institution. Since then its members page has added five new members and lists seven prospective ones.

For a design guide, the NDB shows how a young multilateral lender with equal founding shareholders can keep a short set of initials steady while its membership list keeps growing and its offices spread from Shanghai to Johannesburg, São Paulo and Gujarat. Compare the AIIB, another multilateral bank founded in the mid-2010s, and the World Bank. For this guide we use a deep lagoon blue, a river teal, a muted gold and a stone white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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