Singapore, 1932.

OCBC began as a merger. On 31 October 1932, three Singapore banks, the Chinese Commercial Bank (founded in 1912), the Ho Hong Bank (1917) and the Oversea Chinese Bank (1919), combined to form the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, according to Wikipedia. The amalgamation was led by Tan Ean Kiam, co-founder and managing director of the Oversea Chinese Bank, and Lee Kong Chian, vice-chairman of the Chinese Commercial Bank. Wikipedia describes Lee as the bank’s founding father: he sat on the OCBC board as vice-chairman from 1932 and became its chairman in 1938.

The combined bank began operating in February 1933, Wikipedia says. Its Chinese name, 華僑銀行, and its long English name both describe the same thing, a bank of the overseas Chinese, and the four initials taken from the English name became the short form that now carries the brand on its own.

The Second World War interrupted the young institution. During the early days of the Japanese Occupation in 1942, Wikipedia says, all the local banks in Singapore closed briefly, and by April 1942 most of them, OCBC included, had resumed normal operations. In Indonesia the occupation authorities closed OCBC’s branches in Sumatra. During the war the bank moved its head office to Bombay, in India, and it re-registered in Singapore only after the war ended. Its branch in Xiamen survived the war, and in the 1950s OCBC still had branches in China.

The post-war decades brought closures as well as growth. Wikipedia records that OCBC re-established branches in Jambi, Jakarta and Surabaya after the war, but that the 1963 conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia led to their closure, and that in the same year the government in Burma nationalised the bank’s two branches there.

One departure from that era shaped another bank brand. In 1959, Wikipedia says, Khoo Teck Puat, then OCBC’s deputy general manager, resigned after he was not appointed to the board, and in 1960 he set up Malayan Banking in Kuala Lumpur with former OCBC staff, the bank known today as Maybank. In December 1972 OCBC acquired the Four Seas Communications Bank, which had been founded in 1906 as the Sze Hai Tong Bank and whose founders had served the Teochew community.

A ship that stayed on board.

The bank’s headquarters arrived before its modern name. In 1976 the OCBC Centre, designed by the American architect I. M. Pei, was completed in Singapore, and it serves as OCBC’s headquarters today, according to Wikipedia.

The name and the logo then changed together. On 9 May 1989, Wikipedia says, OCBC took on a new corporate identity, changing its logo and changing its name to OCBC Bank. The initials that had long served as shorthand became the name on the door.

Through these changes, one motif has held. When the bank refreshed its logo in 2023, Marketing-Interactive reported on 3 July 2023 that the modernised version retained the classic Chinese sailing ship associated with the OCBC brand. According to the bank’s release, as the publication reported it, the ship has featured in every iteration of the logo since the bank was founded in 1932, and it expresses the entrepreneurial spirit of OCBC’s founding fathers as they ventured into Southeast Asia to build homes and businesses that have benefited generations.

The 2023 work was framed as a unification rather than a new start. Marketing-Interactive said OCBC had unified its brand identity across its core markets with legal name changes and a new logo, as part of what the bank calls a “One Group” approach. The refreshed logo was launched for the group’s banking entities, and the Indonesian subsidiary OCBC NISP was to adopt the same logo in the fourth quarter of 2023. The logo of Bank of Singapore, OCBC’s private banking subsidiary, stayed unchanged, the report said.

That private bank has its own short history inside the group. Bank of Singapore was formed on 29 January 2010 from the combination of ING Asia Private Bank, which OCBC had acquired in October 2009, and OCBC Private Bank, according to Wikipedia. The name had previously belonged to the OCBC unit that housed finatiQ, a self-service online bank set up in 2000; that unit was renamed Singapore Island Bank so that the two businesses would not be confused, Wikipedia says.

The result is a group that keeps more than one mark in use: the ship for the banks that carry the OCBC name, and a separate identity for the private bank.

Bank names, symbols and colours.

Many bank names in Asia are the product of mergers, and the name chosen at each merger tends to tell the story in compressed form. Some institutions keep a founder’s family name or a place name; others stack the names of the banks that combined; and many settle on a set of initials. Over time those initials often stop standing for anything in particular and become the name in their own right, while the long form survives mainly in legal documents and company histories.

Colour does a great deal of the recognition work. Red and gold carry associations of prosperity and good fortune in several Asian cultures, and both appear widely in banking, often as one dominant colour applied flat across every surface so that a mark stays legible when it is very small.

The surfaces themselves have multiplied. Branch signage, illuminated fascias and cash-machine housings were once the main public face of a bank; today the payment card in a wallet and the app icon on a phone screen are seen far more often. A square icon a few millimetres wide leaves room for little more than a symbol and a colour, which is one reason bank identities are increasingly simplified to those two elements.

From OCBC Bank to “For now, and beyond”.

The 2023 refresh changed names as well as artwork. In Hong Kong, Marketing-Interactive reported, OCBC Wing Hang Bank became OCBC Bank (Hong Kong), and in Macau Banco OCBC Weng Hang was renamed OCBC Bank (Macau). Pending regulatory approval, OCBC Wing Hang Bank (China) was to change its legal name to OCBC Bank in mainland China in the fourth quarter of 2023.

A line of words arrived with the refreshed mark. Alongside the logo, the bank launched the tagline “For now, and beyond”, with the Chinese version 心所向，行致远, the publication reported. According to the bank’s release, the line reflects a habit of taking a long-term view of its dealings and investments and a commitment to the future as well as the present. Helen Wong, OCBC’s group chief executive, linked the unified brand to the bank’s work between Southeast Asia and Greater China, Marketing-Interactive reported.

The group behind the brand had been assembled over the previous decades. In August 2001 OCBC acquired Keppel Capital Holdings and its subsidiaries, including Keppel TatLee Bank, and by February 2002 the two banks were operationally and legally integrated, according to Wikipedia. In 2004 OCBC acquired the insurer Great Eastern Holdings after a voluntary cash offer. In September 2005 the asset management arms of OCBC and Great Eastern merged to form Lion Capital Management, which was renamed Lion Global Investors in 2008, Wikipedia says.

Those businesses kept their own names, while the 2023 refresh brought the banking entities’ legal names and logo into line across OCBC’s core markets, Marketing-Interactive reported, with the Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China banks taking the OCBC Bank name.

For a design guide, OCBC shows how a single pictorial motif can survive every redraw of a logo for nine decades, and how a long institutional name can settle into four initials. Compare DBS Bank, another Singapore bank whose initials became its name, and UOB, which grew from a 1935 Chinese bank in the same city. For this guide we use red, a deep red and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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