Punjab National Bank Brand Guidelines: A Lahore Swadeshi Bank of 1894 & a 2020 Merger

A bank founded by Indians, with Indian capital, in Lahore.

Punjab National Bank was registered on 19 May 1894 in Lahore, then part of British India and now in Pakistan, and opened for business on 12 April 1895, a day before the harvest festival of Baisakhi, The Better India reported in February 2018. It grew out of the swadeshi movement, which urged Indians to build their own industries and institutions. The bank’s own history says the idea came from Rai Mool Raj of the Arya Samaj and that Lala Lajpat Rai sent round a circular calling for an Indian joint-stock bank.

The founding board was deliberately mixed. The bank lists Dyal Singh Majithia, founder of the Tribune newspaper and the first chairman; Lala Harkishen Lal, later known as an early Punjabi industrialist and the board’s first secretary; Lala Lalchand; the Bengali pleader Kali Prosanna Roy; the Parsi merchant E. C. Jessawala; Prabhu Dayal of Multan; Bakshi Jaishi Ram; and Lala Dholan Dass of Amritsar. The bank says a Bengali, a Parsi, a Sikh and several Hindus joined “in a purely national and cosmopolitan spirit.” Lajpat Rai opened the first account, at the office in Anarkali, and later joined the board.

Today PNB calls itself “India’s first Swadeshi Bank” and “the first bank purely managed by Indians with Indian Capital.” English Wikipedia frames the claim more narrowly: the Oudh Commercial Bank of 1881 came earlier but failed in 1958, so PNB is the oldest Indian-capital bank still operating. The bank also says it chose “Stability” as its telegraphic address, appointed auditors in 1895 before the law required them, and introduced a teller system in 1944. It opened its first branch outside Lahore, at Rawalpindi, in 1900, and the bank says it came through the banking crisis of 1913, when dozens of Indian banks failed.

Partition, nationalisation and a run of mergers.

The defining break came in 1947. On 31 March that year, before Partition, the bank decided to leave Lahore, and on 20 June the Lahore High Court allowed it to move its registered office to Delhi, the bank says. It had to close 92 offices in West Pakistan, about a third of its network and some 40 per cent of its deposits, and it kept a few caretaker branches. The bank says it repaid depositors who had fled “on the basis of whatever little evidence they could produce,” and The Better India retold the same story in 2018. In 1951 it took over Bharat Bank, which the bank says made it the second-largest private-sector bank in India at the time.

On 19 July 1969 the Government of India nationalised PNB with 13 other large commercial banks. Growth after that came largely through takeovers: the bank counts seven private banks absorbed over its history, among them Hindustan Commercial Bank in 1986 and Nedungadi Bank of Kerala in 2003, and in 1993 it absorbed New Bank of India, which it describes as the only merger of a nationalised bank into PNB until then. In 2002 the government sold a fifth of its holding in an initial public offering, and a follow-on offer in March 2005 cut the government’s stake to 57.8 per cent, according to the bank. The shares trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India.

The biggest change came in 2020. On 30 August 2019 the government announced that Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India would merge into PNB, part of a plan to fold ten public-sector banks into four, and the merger took effect on 1 April 2020, Mint reported that day. The branches of the two smaller banks began working as PNB branches, and DNA reported that the enlarged lender became the second-largest nationalised bank after State Bank of India; PNB called the merged bank “PNB 2.0.”

How Indian banks present themselves.

Indian banks tend to present themselves through a short name and a bold symbol. The State Bank of India’s keyhole, drawn at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and adopted in 1971, replaced a banyan tree, The Hindu BusinessLine reported, and in 2017 the bank cut its long name to the letters SBI beside that symbol, The Economic Times reported. Across the sector, blues, reds and oranges are common in bank marks, usually pairing one symbol with a short wordmark.

Language is part of the identity. The keyhole came with matching lettering of the bank’s name in nine Indian languages, according to BusinessLine, and Indian bank signs and websites commonly set Hindi and English names side by side, with regional scripts added in different states. Names change too: UTI Bank became Axis Bank in 2007 because other organisations used the UTI name, Mint reported, and the merger of five associate banks into SBI on 1 April 2017 took their names off branch signboards, The Hindu reported.

Bank websites follow a common pattern. Pages on savings accounts, loans and cards sit beside digital banking apps, branch and cash-machine locators, and photographs of branches and staff. Financial inclusion has a long history in the sector’s self-presentation: BusinessLine dates its start to the nationalisation of fourteen banks in 1969, and government schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana appear in the State Bank of India’s website menus. The websites of both the State Bank of India and Axis Bank now sit at addresses ending in .bank.in.

Annual reports and corporate social responsibility programmes complete the picture, setting out branch networks, rural reach and foundation work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name and ownership changed, and what is documented about its symbol — and marks clearly what rests only on the bank’s own word.

A national name with a long public record.

PNB’s public record includes a serious fraud. In February 2018 the bank disclosed that it had detected fraudulent transactions; the bank said unapproved guarantees issued by its own staff had been used to borrow from other lenders, the BBC reported in March 2019. Investigations and extradition proceedings followed in India and the United Kingdom, and in March 2019 one of the main suspects was arrested in London at India’s request, the BBC reported.

The bank’s reach now runs well beyond Delhi. English Wikipedia lists a banking subsidiary in the United Kingdom, branches in Hong Kong and Dubai, a majority holding in Druk PNB Bank in Bhutan and a minority stake in Everest Bank in Nepal, along with domestic subsidiaries such as PNB Gilts and stakes in PNB Housing Finance and the insurer PNB MetLife. The bank also sponsors regional rural banks in several states.

Its heritage remains part of how the bank speaks about itself. Its history pages recall that the Jallianwala Bagh Committee account, opened at the bank, was operated by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and that later national leaders banked there too; the same page calls PNB “a symbol of Trust and a name you can bank upon.” The bank’s corporate office is in New Delhi, and its websites moved to the pnb.bank.in address used by Indian banks.

For a design guide, Punjab National Bank shows how a public-sector bank leans on a founding story — Lahore, swadeshi capital and the move after Partition — rather than on novelty. Compare Canara Bank, another bank nationalised in 1969 and enlarged in 2020, and HDFC Bank, a private-sector lender from the 1990s. For this guide we use a maroon, a marigold and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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