Yapı Kredi Brand Guidelines: Kazım Taşkent’s 1944 Bank, a Stork Logo & the Koç Ram

A private bank opened in Istanbul in 1944.

Yapı Kredi’s full name, Yapı ve Kredi Bankası, means “Construction and Credit Bank,” English Wikipedia notes. The bank’s own timeline says it was established by a decree of the Council of Ministers dated 6 July 1944, that its articles were registered in Istanbul the next day, and that Kazım Taşkent became chairman, with Sermet Çifter as general manager. It opened for business on Saturday 9 September 1944 with its branch at Bahçekapı in Istanbul.

How to describe that start depends on the source. The bank calls itself the first private bank founded in the Republican era; Hürriyet, marking its 60th anniversary on 8 September 2004, called it Turkey’s first private bank; Turkish Wikipedia calls it the country’s first nationwide private bank focused on retail banking.

Advertising was part of the plan from the beginning. The bank says that while Turkish banks then placed unchanging notices on the back pages of newspapers, Yapı Kredi took prominent pages with changing designs and copy, and that it was the first to use a wall advertisement, neon lighting, cinema and theatre curtains and radio for bank advertising.

Its early products aimed at savers. The timeline says the bank introduced Yapı Tasarruf (building savings) accounts in 1945 and a prize savings scheme whose first draw was held on 9 September 1946, and that it opened neighbourhood branches to bring banking to ordinary customers.

A bank of culture and art.

Culture sits at the centre of Yapı Kredi’s story about itself. Its website quotes Kazım Taşkent: large institutions have two duties, one to their own business and one to society, and “we chose culture and art,” so “we are the bank of culture and art.”

The timeline lists a long run of projects. The children’s magazine Doğan Kardeş was published from 1945 to 1978 and again from 1988 to 1993. The bank says it started a children’s theatre in 1949 at the Tepebaşı City Theatre, and in 1964, for its 20th anniversary, opened what it calls Turkey’s first bank art gallery in its head office at Galatasaray, later renamed the Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery. In 1992 it brought its cultural activities together under Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, with exhibitions, a publishing house and a bookshop. For young audiences it began a festival called Genç Günler in 1988, which the bank says ran as the Yapı Kredi Arts Festival until 2002.

The bank also lists collections it holds, among them an Atatürk collection, a shadow-play collection, a coin collection and a collection of prayer beads, and it names the Afife Theatre Awards and support for the archaeological excavations at Aphrodisias and Çatalhöyük among its cultural projects.

The products have their own history. The bank says it set up an electronic accounting centre at its Galatasaray head office in 1967, opened a representative office in Moscow in 1988, combined its domestic and international credit cards as Worldcard in 1991, and in the same year introduced what it describes as Turkey’s first electronic POS terminal. Worldcard remains one of its card names today, alongside cards such as adios and Crystal.

Design and documentation.

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.

From a stork to a ram’s horn.

Ownership changed several times. English Wikipedia says Çukurova Holding acquired Yapı Kredi in 1984, and in 2004 Hürriyet reported an agreement between the Çukurova group and Turkey’s banking regulator to sell the group’s stake. On 28 September 2005 a 57.4 percent stake passed to Koçbank, owned by Koç Financial Services, a joint venture of Koç Holding and Italy’s UniCredit. The two banks merged, and the combined bank, keeping the Yapı Kredi name, was completed on 2 October 2006, haberler.com reported that day; the chief executive said the name was kept because of the trust the public placed in it.

The merger changed the mark. The same report said the stork that had stood in Yapı Kredi’s logo for 62 years, a symbol of nest-building and growth, was replaced by Koç Holding’s ram’s horn; the lettering moved from capitals to lower case, “Yapı ve Kredi Bankası” on signs was joined into “YapıKredi”, and a grey background was chosen. The new logo went up on 585 branches and more than 600 outdoor cash machines.

Storks had appeared in the bank’s work before. In May 1980, its timeline says, Yapı Kredi ran a stork-count survey among primary schools with a Turkish nature conservation society, as part of a nature and children week in which more than 43,000 pupils took part with their teachers.

The partnership with UniCredit was restructured in December 2019: Koç took all of Koç Financial Services, and UniCredit kept a direct stake in the bank, Cumhuriyet reported on 5 December 2019. English Wikipedia says UniCredit left the bank’s shareholding in 2021. Turkish Wikipedia says the Koç Group now holds about two-thirds of the bank directly and indirectly, with the rest traded on Borsa İstanbul. The head office is the Yapı Kredi Plaza in Levent, Istanbul.

For a design guide, Yapı Kredi shows how a bank can keep its name and its cultural voice while changing its emblem to match a new owner. Compare Akbank, another Istanbul bank tied to a family business group, and İşbank. For this guide we use a navy, a clear blue and a grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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