TBC Bank Brand Guidelines: Tbilisi Business Centre, a London Listing & TBC Uzbekistan

Three initials that became a name.

TBC Bank was founded in Tbilisi in 1992. English Wikipedia says it was set up by two Georgian businessmen, Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze, together with other Georgian partners, under the name Tbilisi Business Centre, shortened to TBC. It received a general banking licence from the National Bank of Georgia on 20 January 1993 and a licence for international transactions that May, the same article says, citing the International Finance Corporation.

The initials have since become the bank’s registered name rather than an abbreviation, according to Wikipedia, which cites the bank. In 1995, the article adds, TBC still had a single branch and 29 employees, and Vakhtang Butskhrikidze, who had joined in 1993, became chief executive that year.

From the 2000s the bank built a group of companies around the lending business, Wikipedia says. It set up TBC Leasing in Tbilisi in January 2004, with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as a minority shareholder; took a 75 per cent stake in late 2007 in the Azerbaijani lender SOA Kredit, which had worked in micro and small-business finance there since 1999 and was renamed TBC Credit; opened TBC Invest in Israel in 2011 to serve Israeli clients; and in 2016 bought the insurer Kopenbur, from which it formed TBC Insurance. In August 2019 it took a majority stake in the Georgian e-commerce platform My.GE, and its TBC Pay business runs online payments and a network of self-service payment terminals.

Outside banking, TBC co-founded SABA, an annual Georgian literary award that has honoured books of the year since 2003, according to Wikipedia.

London, then Tashkent.

In June 2014 TBC Bank listed global depositary receipts on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange, English Wikipedia says. By early 2019 the bank’s parent was a British holding company, TBC Bank Group PLC, listed in the exchange’s premium segment and included in the FTSE 250 index, Caucasus Business Week reported.

Expansion into Uzbekistan began in 2019. In April that year UzDaily reported that TBC Bank Group PLC had agreed to buy 51 per cent of LLC Inspired, the company behind the Uzbek payment app Payme, with completion expected by the end of that month and an option arrangement covering the remaining 49 per cent that could normally be exercised only between the fourth and seventh anniversaries of completion; the group said Payme would give it access to a large customer base and let it use its digital strengths from Georgia. Wikipedia records the stake as acquired in 2019, the same year TBC gained a banking licence in Uzbekistan.

The Uzbek bank, TBC Uzbekistan, was built as a digital bank. Its chief executive dated its launch to 2020 in a statement quoted by Trend in July 2026, when TBC Uzbekistan was named Central Asia’s top digital bank in the Euromoney Awards for Excellence and also took Uzbek awards for digital banking, consumer lending and digital banking for small businesses, according to the company.

The same Trend report describes an ecosystem that covers retail banking, lending, payments, buy now, pay later, insurance, and travel and ticketing services, a business platform called TBC Business and the BILLZ retail-management platform. Its newest face is an AI assistant named Lola, which the company says runs on its own speech recognition and Uzbek-language large language models and is also used in customer support.

How banks in the region present themselves.

Many banks in Central Asia and the Caucasus now present themselves through their apps. In Kazakhstan, Kaspi.kz describes a single “Super App” that joins bill payments, an online marketplace, consumer credit, transfers and QR payments in shops, while Halyk Bank, the former state savings bank, sells its retail services through the Halyk SuperApp and its business services through Onlinebank. In the apps these two banks describe, loans, deposits, cards and transfers sit beside shopping, travel and government services.

Names are usually shown in more than one language and script. Halyk Bank’s full name appears in Kazakh as Қазақстан Халық Банкі, in Russian as Народный банк Казахстана and in English as Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan; Kaspi Bank was registered for years under the Russian name Банк Каспийский before it took its Latin-letter brand in 2008. Across the region, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani names may appear beside Latin and Cyrillic forms, so a wordmark has to work in several alphabets at once.

Many of these banks now operate across borders. Halyk Group runs subsidiaries in Georgia and Uzbekistan, and Kaspi.kz has bought classified-advert sites in Azerbaijan and businesses in Turkey. Halyk’s website lists loans, deposits, cards and transfers, and both groups, as listed companies, publish investor-relations sections with financial results for shareholders.

Colour and type vary from bank to bank. The palettes in this series of guides — reds, greens, blues and teals among them — are our own unofficial interpretations, set beside a Google Fonts stand-in for each brand. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when it was founded, how its name changed, who owns it and how it presents its services — and keeps figures such as customer numbers to a minimum, attributed to the source and date that gave them.

Georgian and English, personal and business.

At home, TBC Bank presents itself in Georgian and English at tbcbank.ge, with a dark mode on the site and the same split between personal and business banking that runs through its app. The bank’s own menus in November 2026 list the TBC Card, a “My Goal” deposit, video banking, crypto investments and payment by palm, alongside business loans, trade finance and an investment arm, TBC Capital. Personal customers are also offered money transfers, instant and QR transfers and a pay-later option, while the business pages add payroll programmes, cash collection and POS terminals for merchants.

Education is part of the brand as well. The site lists a Tech School, an IT Academy and a Risks Academy among its programmes, and a separate business-education section, which sit next to the SABA literary award as the bank’s cultural work. Wikipedia lists TBC’s markets as Georgia, Azerbaijan, Israel and Uzbekistan.

The name itself travels across scripts and markets. In Georgian script the bank is written თიბისი ბანკი, according to Wikipedia, while the Latin initials TBC stay the same in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. The three letters also work as a prefix across the group: Wikipedia’s list of subsidiaries includes TBC Leasing, TBC Credit, TBC Invest and TBC Pay, and in Uzbekistan the TBC Uzbekistan name sits beside the separate Payme app brand.

For a design guide, TBC Bank shows how a set of initials from a 1992 business centre can become a registered name that works across Georgian and Latin text, a London listing and a digital bank in another country. Compare Bank of Georgia, another Tbilisi bank, and Kapitalbank in Tashkent. For this guide we use a cobalt, a sky tint and slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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