QIB Brand Guidelines: Qatar’s 1982 Islamic Bank, the Misk Account & a 320-Feature App

An application in 1980, a decree in 1982, a first office in Msheireb.

Qatar Islamic Bank, which presents itself simply as QIB, traces its start to an application lodged in 1980. The bank’s own chronology says Decree No. 45 of 1982 established it as the first Islamic financial institution in Qatar, and English Wikipedia gives the same founding year and the same description. Operations began in 1983 from a first headquarters on Electricity Street in Msheireb, in central Doha; English Wikipedia dates the opening of the first branch for customers to July 1983.

From the start the bank has worked under a Shari’a board. English Wikipedia describes that board as supervising its products and operations so that they follow Islamic banking and finance principles, and the bank describes its offer as tailored Shari’a-compliant banking for individuals, businesses and investors. In 1993, the chronology says, QIB moved to a head office on Grand Hamad Street; by 2003 it had ten branches, and in 2005 it began what it calls an administrative transformation phase.

QIB became a listed company in 1998, when, according to English Wikipedia, its shares joined the Qatar Stock Exchange. The same article names the Qatar Investment Authority as the single largest shareholder, with the rest held by other Qatari individuals, families and institutions. The bank’s leadership page calls it “Qatar’s largest Islamic bank,” a description it uses of itself; English Wikipedia, citing 2019 figures, also describes it as the largest Islamic bank in the country, and Gulf Times reported in November 2025 that it held nearly half of the Islamic banking market.

Misk, takaful and an app with more than 320 features.

QIB’s range is laid out in plain banking terms: current, savings and deposit accounts; debit, credit, prepaid and charge cards; and personal, vehicle and home finance, with home finance offered alongside takaful cover, the Islamic form of insurance. Customers are grouped into tiers named Essential Banking, Tamayuz Banking and Private Banking, and there are packages for university students (Bedaya), children (the QIB Junior Program), payroll customers and domestic workers.

The product that appears most often in its news is the Misk account. The bank describes it as a Shari’a-compliant savings account that earns profit on the average balance and enters holders into weekly and monthly prize draws, and it regularly announces new Misk winners. Co-branded cards include a Marriott Bonvoy range and, according to Gulf Times, cards with the telecoms company Ooredoo for small businesses.

Much of the brand now lives on a phone screen. The chronology lists a move to the Temenos core banking system in 2016, a digital transformation phase and branch modernisation from 2017, a mobile app offering more than 300 services in 2021, the QIB Lite app for workers in 2023, which the bank calls the first app of its kind, and the QIB Junior app in 2025. Gulf Times reported in November 2025 that more than 83% of QIB customers banked digitally, that the app had over 320 integrated features, and that its Marketplace and Auto Marketplace let customers buy services beyond banking. In September 2026 the bank added an advanced search, a redesigned credit-card overview and an in-app customer survey.

Recognition has followed that push. At The Asset Triple A Islamic Finance Awards 2025, Gulf Times reported, QIB was named “Islamic Bank of the Year in Qatar,” alongside three titles for retail, small-business and wealth-management banking.

Design and documentation.

Islamic banks present themselves through a small set of recurring signals. Green, gold and deep blue appear often in their wordmarks and branch signs, and many write their names in two scripts side by side: Arabic, or Jawi in Malaysia, next to Latin letters. Geometric patterns, drawn from the long tradition of Islamic ornament, turn up on cards, reports and branch interiors, usually as a background rather than as a logo.

Their names tend to say what they are. Words such as “Islamic,” “Islam” and “Syariah” sit in the name itself, alongside the country or city, so that the banking model is part of the brand. Product names follow the same logic: accounts and financing are often labelled with the Arabic name of the contract behind them, such as murabaha, a cost-plus sale; ijara, a lease; mudharabah, a profit-sharing arrangement; or wakalah, an agency.

Their websites have a common structure. Alongside the usual pages on savings, cards and home and business financing, most carry a page on the bank’s Sharia supervisory board or council, the panel of scholars that reviews its products, and many add pages on sukuk, the Sharia-compliant certificates used in place of conventional bonds, on takaful, the cooperative form of insurance, and on zakat and charitable giving. Newer banking apps add prayer times and the qibla direction next to transfers and payments.

Annual and sustainability reports are where much of the identity is set out at length, with the Sharia board’s statement printed beside the auditors’ report. This guide follows what dated sources say about each bank — when it was founded, how it was merged, renamed or listed, and how it describes its own products — and treats the palette and type shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than any bank’s own.

A Doha bank with a group around it.

Over four decades QIB has built a group around the bank. Its group page lists Al Jazeera Finance, set up in 1989, in which it holds 30%; Aqar, a real-estate company established in 2000, in which it holds 49%; the investment firm QInvest, established in 2007 and licensed by the Qatar Financial Centre, also 49% owned; and Bawabat Al Shamal, the associate behind the Doha Festival City development, which opened to the public in April 2017. Abroad it lists QIB UK, opened in London in 2008; Arab Finance House in Beirut, established in 2003, which it describes as the first fully fledged Islamic bank in Lebanon; and a branch in Sudan, approved in 2012 and opened in July 2013. English Wikipedia adds that in February 2018 QIB sold its stake in Asian Finance Bank, in Malaysia, to Malaysian Building Society Bhd.

The identity itself is compact. In its own news releases the bank calls itself “Qatar’s leading digital bank,” and those releases open with the full name, Qatar Islamic Bank, and then switch to QIB, the initialism that also names its app, its UK arm and products such as QIB Lite and QIB Junior. Its website runs in English and Arabic, and the same short name carries through its account tiers, its card pages and its regular Misk prize announcements.

For a design guide, QIB shows how a short initialism can carry a long institutional name, and how a bank’s chronology, Shari’a language and app features can share one plain register. Compare QNB, Qatar National Bank, and Masraf Al Rayan, another Islamic bank in Doha. For this guide we use a deep blue, warm sand and dune gold with a clean geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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