A bank of 1862, a Basel consortium of 1854 and a merger in 1998.

UBS is the product of two Swiss banking families, and its name and its symbol each come from a different one. The name comes from the Union Bank of Switzerland. English Wikipedia traces that bank to the Bank in Winterthur, founded in 1862 to finance industry and other companies, which merged with the Toggenburger Bank in 1912 to form the Union Bank of Switzerland. In 1917 it opened a new headquarters on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Its 1966 logo, Wikipedia notes, set out the initials of its English and French names, UBS, beside the German ones, SBG.

The symbol comes from the Swiss Bank Corporation. Its earliest ancestor, according to English Wikipedia, was formed in Basel in 1854, when six private banking firms pooled their resources in a consortium called the Bankverein, which underwrote securities for its members. The name in German, Schweizerischer Bankverein, kept that word, and the bank remained rooted in Basel, which is why UBS today lists both Zurich and Basel as its home cities.

The two banks came together at the end of 1997. On 6 December 1997 The Independent reported, citing banking sources, that the Union Bank of Switzerland was poised to merge part or all of its operations with Swiss Bank Corporation, and that staff had been called to weekend meetings to hear what it would mean for them. English Wikipedia records that the two banks announced an all-stock merger on 8 December 1997, and that the combined bank was formed on 29 June 1998.

Wikipedia says that the merged bank was initially called the “New UBS”, to distinguish it from the old Union Bank of Switzerland, and that from November 1998 it was known only as UBS, with divisions named after it. In the same account, Mathis Cabiallavetta of the Union Bank of Switzerland became chairman, and Marcel Ospel of Swiss Bank Corporation became chief executive.

Warja Lavater’s keys.

The symbol at the heart of the UBS identity is older than the bank that carries it. The three keys were drawn for Swiss Bank Corporation by the Swiss artist Warja Lavater, who was born in Winterthur and studied graphic art in Zurich from 1931 to 1935 under Ernst Keller, according to English Wikipedia. The bank’s own history, as English Wikipedia reports it, says SBC adopted the three keys in 1937 and that they stand for confidence, security and discretion. The same date is given in Michael Evamy’s 2007 book Logo, which Wikipedia quotes.

German Wikipedia tells the story from the designer’s side and gives a slightly later date. It says that in April 1937 the young window dresser Gottfried Honegger, who was looking for a partner for his graphics studio in Zurich, contacted Lavater in Basel on the recommendation of the designer Hermann Eidenbenz, and that the two set up the studio Honegger und Lavater. Their early work was mainly posters for restaurants and hairdressers. German Wikipedia dates the logo for the Schweizerischer Bankverein, together with an emblem for the Swiss national exhibition, to 1939, and says those two commissions established the studio in Zurich.

Lavater later became known well beyond banking. English Wikipedia describes her as an artist and illustrator known for accordion-fold books that retell classic fairy tales with symbols in place of words or pictures. Her artistic estate, the same article says, is held by the Zurich Central Library.

When the two banks merged, the choice of identity was split down the middle. English Wikipedia says the combined bank became known only as UBS while keeping Swiss Bank Corporation’s three keys. It also notes that UBS is no longer an acronym for Union Bank of Switzerland but simply the company’s name, so the three letters now stand on their own, beside a symbol drawn for the other parent.

European banks and their marks.

Bank names are often the residue of mergers. Two or three older institutions combine, and the new name is either a fresh coinage, a stack of the founders’ names, or a set of initials that once spelled out something longer. Over time the initialism tends to become the name in its own right, and the long form is quietly retired; the letters stay because customers already know them, while the words behind them no longer describe what the bank does.

Visual identity in banking leans on a small set of devices. Heraldic animals such as lions, and symbols such as keys, stars and birds, borrow the language of seals and coats of arms, signalling continuity and safekeeping. Banks often pair a single symbol with one dominant brand colour, used flat across branches, cards, apps and statements, so that the colour does the recognition work even when the logo is small.

Taglines carry the rest. They change more often than logos do, and are best read as dated campaigns rather than permanent parts of the mark. When studying a bank identity, it helps to separate the long-lived core — name, symbol, colour — from the advertising layer that sits on top of it.

From Warburg and PaineWebber to one name.

After 1998 the keys and the three letters had to share space with other names. English Wikipedia records that the investment banking arm, which came from SBC’s Warburg Dillon Read business, traded as UBS Warburg from 1999 to 2003. In November 2000 UBS merged with the American brokerage Paine Webber, and the brand UBS PaineWebber was used from 2001 until 2003, when the PaineWebber name was dropped. From then on the bank presented its businesses under the UBS name alone, with descriptive titles such as UBS Investment Bank and UBS Asset Management.

Under that single-name approach, the divisions are told apart by plain words after the name rather than by separate brands. The New York offices at 299 Park Avenue, pictured on English Wikipedia, carry the keys on a large cube outside the building.

The identity came through a further merger in the 2020s. On 19 March 2023 SWI swissinfo.ch reported that Credit Suisse would be taken over by its rival UBS after a last-ditch deal brokered over a weekend. The takeover brought another long-established Swiss bank under the keys and letters that had joined Winterthur and Basel in 1998.

The history explains why the UBS identity reads the way it does. The name is a set of initials that no longer spells anything out, and the symbol is a drawing by a Zurich artist that predates the merged bank by six decades. Together they carry the memory of two banks, Winterthur and Basel, into one mark.

For a design guide, UBS shows how a merger can divide its inheritance, taking the name from one parent and the symbol from the other, and keep both for decades. Compare Deutsche Bank, another European bank with a single abstract mark, and Barclays, a bank known by its eagle. For this guide we use red, black and a pale rose with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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