TEB Brand Guidelines: Kocaeli Halk Bankası 1927, BNP Paribas & the 2011 Fortis Merger

A local credit bank in İzmit.

TEB began as a local bank in İzmit, the main town of Kocaeli province on the Sea of Marmara. Turkish Wikipedia traces the idea to the İzmir Economic Congress, where delegates from İzmit presented a report that called for a credit bank to be set up. The bank was founded on 26 January 1927 as Kocaeli Halk Bankası Türk Anonim Şirketi, by a group of 83 people, the same article says; its articles of association were registered by the court in May 1927 and by the İzmit chamber of trade and industry in June, and 6 June 1927 is treated as its official founding date. English Wikipedia also gives İzmit and 1927, and describes the bank as one of Türkiye’s oldest financial institutions.

For more than half a century the bank stayed in Kocaeli and the surrounding area. Turkish Wikipedia says its name was shortened to Kocaeli Bankası on 3 October 1961. The Kocaeli link survives in the shareholder register: the bank’s own ownership table still lists the Kocaeli Chamber of Commerce as a shareholder, with a very small stake.

The change from local to national bank came in 1982. On 27 July 1982, Turkish Wikipedia says, Kocaeli Bankası took the name Türk Ekonomi Bankası, meaning Turkish Economy Bank, and moved its head office to Istanbul. In the 1980s it concentrated on foreign trade finance and investment banking, according to the same article. Turkish Wikipedia says TEB has offered private banking since 1989 and describes it as the first bank in Türkiye to offer private banking and wealth management services.

The bank’s own history page describes TEB as one of Türkiye’s most established financial institutions, active in banking since 1927, and lists investment, leasing, factoring, insurance and portfolio management among the fields in which it now acts as an intermediary.

BNP Paribas, Fortis and one name.

The partnership that shapes TEB today was signed in 2005. TEB says it signed a strategic partnership agreement with the French bank BNP Paribas on 10 February 2005; Turkish Wikipedia adds that the agreement concerned the shares of TEB Mali Yatırımlar A.Ş., the company through which TEB was held, and that talks had begun in 2004. Under the agreement, TEB says, BNP Paribas also became a shareholder in TEB Yatırım, the leasing business, TEB Faktoring, TEB Portföy Yönetimi and TEB Kosova, and TEB joined BNP Paribas’s international network of trade centres.

TEB says the partnership took its expertise in corporate, commercial and private banking into retail, business and SME banking, and English Wikipedia dates its entry into SME banking to 2005.

A second step followed after BNP Paribas acquired control of Fortis Bank in Belgium and Luxembourg in 2009, which made it the main shareholder of Fortis Bank’s Turkish arm as well, according to Turkish Wikipedia. The two Turkish banks were merged under the TEB name. On 21 March 2011 Bloomberg HT, carrying an Anadolu Ajansı report, quoted TEB’s chairman as saying the merger had been completed on 14 February and that the bank would now face customers as the “new TEB.” At the same press conference, the head of BNP Paribas in Türkiye said the merger had produced a 50–50 partnership with the Çolakoğlu Group, that this balance would not change, and that there were no plans to change the bank’s name. Turkish Wikipedia says all former Fortis branches had been converted to TEB by 21 March 2011.

The TEB name therefore survived two foreign transactions. The partner’s presence shows mainly in co-branded events: Turkish Wikipedia says TEB and BNP Paribas were title sponsors of the WTA Championships held in Istanbul in 2011, 2012 and 2013, under the name TEB-BNP Paribas WTA Istanbul Championships, and that TEB sponsored the TEB-BNP Paribas İstanbul Cup in 2014. In November 2026 the newspaper Başak Gazetesi reported a climate economy and sustainable finance meeting held in Istanbul by TEB with BNP Paribas, where a BNP Paribas regional head described a partnership of more than 20 years.

Turkish banking and its visual language.

Turkish banks tend to present themselves through bold, simple wordmarks and one dominant colour. Across the country’s large lenders the palettes run through greens, reds, blues and purples, and the names keep their Turkish letters — the dotted capital İ, the ş, the ı and the ğ — on logos, apps and branch signs, so a typeface that handles those diacritics cleanly belongs in any design brief for the sector.

Advertising is a large part of how these brands are known at home. Mascots, recurring characters and campaigns led by well-known actors and athletes appear across the sector, alongside photography of branches, city streets and Istanbul itself. On their websites the banks arrange themselves around everyday tasks: accounts, loans, credit cards and loyalty programmes, and mobile apps that sit at the front of most pages.

Sponsorship and culture extend the identity. Turkish banks sponsor football, concerts and festivals, and some run publishers, galleries, museums or art collections under their own names; İşbank’s publishing house and painting collection, and the SALT institution that grew out of Garanti BBVA’s Ottoman Bank archive, are two documented examples covered in this series.

The banks also publish a great deal of formal material. Listed lenders produce annual and integrated reports, sustainability reports and investor presentations in Turkish and English. This series sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it and how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on a bank’s own word.

Three letters, two owners and an app.

TEB’s current ownership is set out on its own investor relations page. It lists TEB Holding A.Ş. with 55 per cent of the capital, and explains that TEB Holding is a 50–50 partnership between BNP Paribas Fortis Yatırım Holding A.Ş. and the Çolakoğlu Group. The rest is held by BNP Paribas Group companies — BNPP Yatırımlar Holding, BNP Paribas Fortis Yatırımlar Holding and BNP Paribas SA directly — with a very small stake held by the Kocaeli Chamber of Commerce. English Wikipedia summarises the same structure as about 45 per cent held directly by BNP Paribas and 55 per cent by a holding company jointly owned by BNP Paribas and the Çolakoğlu Group. Turkish Wikipedia places the head office in Ümraniye, on the Asian side of Istanbul.

The bank has put much of its brand work into its digital channels. Its retail mobile banking platform is called CEPTETEB; English and Turkish Wikipedia give different launch years for it. For business customers it added CEPTETEB İŞTE, which Turkish Wikipedia says launched in the first quarter of 2020 and won the mobile app category of The Banker’s Innovation in Digital Banking Awards.

SME banking remains central to how TEB presents itself. In November 2026 Fintechtime reported that Global Banking & Finance Review had named TEB Türkiye’s top SME bank for 2026, citing its SME advisers, who support businesses on organisation, production and marketing, its role in giving access to KOSGEB support loans, and the CEPTETEB İŞTE app. The bank also runs the TEB Akıl Fikir Yarışması, an ideas competition held each year since 2007 for students, recent graduates and customers under the slogan “İcat Çıkar,” according to Turkish Wikipedia.

For a design guide, TEB shows how a bank can keep a short, national name through a change of ownership and a merger, with its foreign partner appearing beside it in sponsorships rather than replacing it on the branch sign. Compare BNP Paribas, its French partner, and Garanti BBVA, another Turkish bank with a European shareholder. For this guide we use forest green, pale sage and an old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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