Vontobel Brand Guidelines: A Zurich Family Bank Since 1924 and Its Photography Collection

From Haeberli to Vontobel, 1924–1936.

Vontobel began in Zurich in 1924 as a stock brokerage, F.E. Haeberli & Cie, founded by Friedrich Emil Haeberli; English and German Wikipedia and the company’s own history agree on the date. In 1936 Jakob Vontobel took over the firm, which became J. Vontobel & Co. The company describes the takeover as happening “during a challenging economic period.” The sources used for this guide do not say how the bank conducted its business between 1933 and 1945.

The family stayed in charge. German Wikipedia says Jakob Vontobel’s son Hans joined in 1943 and became a partner with unlimited liability in 1951, and that his grandson Hans-Dieter joined in 1972 and became a partner in 1977. In the early 1980s the bank became a limited company — English Wikipedia gives 1983 and German Wikipedia 1984 — and the group’s companies were brought together under Vontobel Holding AG. In 1986 the holding company’s shares were listed on the Zurich stock exchange; the company says the family kept a controlling stake “through a foundation.” In 2000 the bank took the name Bank Vontobel AG, and a single class of registered share followed in 2001, German Wikipedia says.

Today the majority of the shares is held by the Vontobel family and the charitable Vontobel Foundation under a pooling agreement, while the registered shares of Vontobel Holding AG trade on the SIX Swiss Exchange, according to English Wikipedia. The company calls itself “a Swiss investment firm with global reach,” says “we are investors first,” and organises its business around private and institutional clients.

Acquisitions, partners and regulators.

Growth came largely through acquisitions. Vontobel set up in the United States in the 1980s and opened a London office in 2007. In 2004 Raiffeisen, the Swiss cooperative banking group, took a 12.5 percent stake in Vontobel Holding; German Wikipedia says Raiffeisen ended the cooperation agreement between the two with effect from mid-2017, after an arbitration claim filed in November 2012. In 2009 Vontobel bought Commerzbank (Schweiz) AG and opened Bank Vontobel Europe in Munich; Bank Finter followed in 2015 and, in 2018, the private bank Notenstein La Roche, bought from Raiffeisen.

In London it took a majority of the bond manager TwentyFour Asset Management and acquired the remaining 40 percent in 2021, and in 2022 it bought UBS Swiss Financial Advisers from UBS, English Wikipedia says. It has also taken a significant minority stake in the London infrastructure manager Ancala Partners, its route into private markets.

The record also includes legal and regulatory matters, which English Wikipedia sets out. In 2001 the bank abandoned y-o-u, a planned internet bank, before it launched. In January 2010 a Zurich court acquitted two former executives over a 2000 capital increase at Private Equity Holding and dismissed an application to recover assets from the bank. In February 2018 Vontobel settled an investigation by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia into untaxed assets held by German clients, and it concluded discussions with the US Justice Department under that country’s programme for Swiss banks without paying a penalty.

Design and documentation.

Private banks and wealth managers sell trust, continuity and discretion rather than a product on a shelf, and their identities tend to say so quietly. Many lead with a founder’s surname or a family name set as a restrained serif wordmark, sometimes paired with a crest, a heraldic animal or a founding year. Pictet, for example, says its lion comes from a seventeenth-century family coat of arms and has carried the year 1805 beneath it since 1974.

Colour usually follows the same register. Deep green, navy, burgundy and dark brown are common choices across the sector, often set against cream, stone or white, with a muted gold or brass as an accent. The effect is closer to a bound annual report or a club library than to a retail bank, and bright, saturated colours are rare.

Imagery leans on history and people. Websites and printed material often show portraits of founders and partners, historic premises and archive photographs, alongside heritage timelines that count the generations or the years since the founding. Partnerships and family-controlled houses in particular use their age and ownership structure as part of the message, explaining how decisions are taken and who is responsible.

The content itself is advisory. Typical pages cover wealth planning and succession, family offices, investment views and house research, market commentary, sustainable investing and philanthropy services, often with long-form articles and reports rather than short promotional copy. For designers, the sector is a study in restraint: generous white space, careful typography and a narrow palette do much of the work that louder brands leave to slogans.

Photography on the walls.

Vontobel’s most visible design commitment is its art collection. finews.ch reported in February 2024 that the collection concentrates on young contemporary photography-based art, held about 370 works and is shown at the company’s offices in Switzerland and abroad, in entrance halls, client areas, corridors and dining rooms. That month 20 works travelled from Zurich to the New York office. Artists in the collection include Wolfgang Tillmans, Paul Graham, Alec Soth and Barbara Probst, alongside younger names, and it has added an NFT and AI-generated works. A public exhibition space had opened at the Zurich headquarters about a year earlier, and the bank runs a prize for young photographers called “A New Gaze.”

The collection will also shape the bank’s next chapter. On 31 August 2026 Vontobel announced that it had signed a long-term lease for a new campus in Baar, in the canton of Zug, due to open in 2030, where more than 1,500 people now spread across seven Zurich buildings are to work, finews.ch reported. The holding company’s seat is to move there. The campus is to include a residential building in which bank staff will have priority for 80 flats, and the bank’s largest current Zurich office, a building about 50 years old, will be given up. Its existing building in central Zurich is to be rebuilt as a client site for more than 300 staff, with new reception and meeting areas, a private dining restaurant and, in future, the Vontobel art collection. The company told finews.ch that the move was about growth rather than savings.

The Vontobel Foundation also publishes a free series of essays by well-known authors on social, economic and cultural debates, German Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Vontobel shows a listed, family-controlled bank that uses contemporary photography as part of how it presents itself. Compare Julius Baer, another Zurich private bank, and UBS. For this guide we use a slate blue, cool grey and a pale paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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