Postal Savings Bank of China Brand Guidelines: A 1919 Lineage, a 2007 Bank & Two Listings

A savings service older than the bank.

Postal Savings Bank of China is a young bank with an old business behind it. The bank says on its website that postal savings in China can be traced back to 1919. Chinese Wikipedia gives the detail: regulations for postal savings were issued in November 1918, the Ministry of Communications published rules for them in May 1919, and a postal savings and remittance bureau opened on 1 July 1919, at first offering only passbook savings. In March 1930 it was reorganised as a bureau under the directorate of posts, and a law setting out its organisation followed in 1935.

The service stopped for a long stretch. Chinese Wikipedia says that after 1949 the new postal administration took over the old postal system, and in 1953 postal savings were wound up and folded into the local offices of the People’s Bank of China, although post offices kept handling remittances. For many people in that period, the article notes, the post office was the only way to send money home.

Postal savings returned in the 1980s. A joint notice from the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and the People’s Bank of China in January 1986 allowed post offices in twelve cities to take personal deposits, and on 1 April 1986 postal savings formally resumed after a 33-year gap, according to Chinese Wikipedia. A Postal Savings and Remittance Bureau was set up to run the business nationally. At first the money collected was passed to the central bank, and post offices earned a fee; from 1990 the deposits were placed with the central bank at an agreed interest rate.

The service grew quickly but had no lending powers. Chinese Wikipedia says postal savings became the largest and fastest-growing part of the postal business after posts and telecoms were separated between 1998 and 2003, but because it was not a bank it could offer no credit, so rural savings gathered by post offices were not lent back to the same communities. Paper money orders gave way to electronic remittance from 1 July 2001, and in 2004 postal finance was brought under banking supervision, with its accounts kept apart from the postal business.

From a savings service to a listed bank.

The decision to create a bank came with a wider postal reform. Chinese Wikipedia says the State Council adopted a plan for reforming the postal system in July 2005 that called for a postal savings bank. The banking regulator approved its preparation in June 2006 and its opening on 31 December 2006, with China Post Group providing all of the capital. The bank was formally launched in Beijing on 20 March 2007, and the bank itself dates its establishment to March 2007.

Lending followed in stages. Chinese Wikipedia says the regulator allowed corporate business in 2008, and in July 2009 the bank issued its first credit card and expanded into small loans, personal business loans and home loans. On 21 January 2012 it became a joint-stock company, Postal Savings Bank of China Co., Ltd., taking over all the assets, staff and business of the earlier limited company.

Outside investors arrived in December 2015. English and Chinese Wikipedia both say the bank issued new shares to a group of strategic investors, among them Singapore’s Temasek, UBS, DBS and Tencent, who together held 16.92 per cent. The shares were listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in September 2016; English Wikipedia dates the debut to 30 September and Chinese Wikipedia to 28 September. In February 2019, Chinese Wikipedia says, the regulator reclassified the bank as China’s sixth large state-owned commercial bank.

A second listing came at home. On 10 December 2019 its A-shares began trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The Business Times of Singapore, carrying a Reuters report on the debut, described a subdued first day for what it called the largest mainland share sale in four years, and noted that the bank had first listed in Hong Kong in 2016. Both Wikipedia articles also record that in January 2017 the bank launched an asset-custody system built on Hyperledger Fabric, blockchain software developed by IBM. More recently, China Daily reported in May 2026 that in 2025 the Ministry of Finance issued special treasury bonds to recapitalise four large state-owned banks, Postal Savings Bank of China among them.

How Chinese banks present themselves.

China’s large banks present themselves to two audiences at once. Most carry a Chinese name and an English one, and many shorten the English to initials, so a single identity has to work in Chinese characters, in Latin letters and in a short acronym on cards, apps and branch fronts. Red and blue dominate the sector’s colours, and marks are often built around Chinese characters or around round forms that recall coins and seals, though the meaning of a particular mark should be checked against the bank’s own account rather than assumed.

Much of the visual record comes from the banks’ own channels. Their websites set out a mission, a motto and a list of values, usually in both languages, and divide services into retail or personal banking, corporate banking, inclusive finance for small businesses and wealth management. Branch photography, with signage over glass frontages and service halls, is a staple of annual reports and investor pages.

The phone has become a second front door. The big banks run mobile-banking apps and, in several cases, separate lifestyle or payments apps, and they report online user numbers alongside branch counts. Many also link their cards to UnionPay, the national card network.

The paper trail is long and dated. Banks listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong publish annual reports, interim results and ESG reports in Chinese and English, and several issue green bonds or publish separate green-finance reports. For design research, those documents give dated, citable evidence of how an identity is applied, from cover design to typography and photography, and they are the most reliable place to check a claim about a bank’s name, history or scale.

A bank built on the reach of the post.

The bank’s identity rests on reach. In Chinese it is usually shortened to 邮储银行, and in English to PSBC. The Business Times called it the bank “which has the largest network of branches in China” in December 2019. The bank itself says it has about 40,000 outlets serving more than 660 million personal customers, and describes a model that combines outlets it runs directly with agency outlets. Its stated focus is on Sannong customers, the Chinese term for agriculture, rural areas and farmers, along with urban and rural residents and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Its current priorities are written in plain policy language. The bank’s website lists five areas of work, technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance, pension finance and digital finance, and names Sannong finance, microfinance and wealth management among the growth areas it wants to build. It aims, in its own words, to become a “first-tier large retail bank,” and it is the only postal savings bank in mainland China, according to Chinese Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Postal Savings Bank of China shows how a bank can borrow its credibility from an older public service, the post office counter, and turn a savings passbook into a national retail brand. Compare the DBS Bank brand guidelines, for one of the 2015 strategic investors, and the Agricultural Bank of China brand guidelines for another large lender with a rural focus. For this guide we use post-road green, ledger ink and harvest gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Postal Savings Bank of China’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.