Zions Brand Guidelines: A Salt Lake City Savings Bank of 1873 and Its Western Brands

A territory’s savings bank.

Zions began in Salt Lake City in 1873. On 1 July that year, the Deseret News reported in a history published in 1998, thirteen citizens of Utah Territory met in Brigham Young’s office on South Temple to consider a financial institution that all of the territory’s residents could use, to be called Zion’s Savings Bank and Trust Co. It was incorporated on 6 August and opened for business on 1 October 1873, in a building on Main Street beside the ZCMI store. English Wikipedia says the bank was established by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to take over the savings department of Deseret National Bank, and that Brigham Young, the church’s president, was its first president.

The bank settled at one address early. In 1889 it moved into a new six-storey building at One Main Street, the Deseret News reported; that building is gone, but the company’s headquarters still used the address in 1998. Through the 1890s, the paper said, the bank helped launch businesses including Bingham Copper, later Kennecott, the railroad from Salt Lake to Los Angeles that became part of the Union Pacific main line, Salt Lake Gas and Utah Sugar.

It came through two crises. The financial panic of 1893 put the bank under heavy pressure, but it stayed solvent. On 15 February 1932 depositors began a run on the bank, lining up with passbooks in hand; within days the lines shortened as word spread that the bank would stay open until every demand had been met, and by the end of the month deposits again exceeded withdrawals, the Deseret News reported. By 1951, the paper said, deposits stood at a record.

Dropping the apostrophe.

The modern name came out of a merger. In 1957 Zion’s Savings Bank and Trust Co. joined Utah Savings and Trust Co., founded in 1889, and First National Bank of Salt Lake City, founded in 1890, to form Zions First National Bank, “dropping the familiar apostrophe from the name,” as the Deseret News put it. On 22 April 1960 the church sold majority control to Keystone Insurance and Investment Co., a Utah company. The holding company took the name Zions Bancorporation in 1965 and became publicly owned in 1966; Wikipedia adds that it operated as Zions Utah Bancorporation from 1966 to 1987.

Growth came state by state. Wikipedia says Zions bought Nevada State Bank in 1985, entered Arizona in 1986 with Mesa Bank, and reached Colorado and New Mexico in 1996 through Aspen Bancshares. In 1997 it bought 27 branches in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Utah from Wells Fargo, as well as Tri-State Bank of Idaho and Vectra Banking of Colorado. A bid for First Security Corporation, announced in 1999, ended when Zions shareholders rejected the merger, and in April 2000 Wells Fargo agreed to buy First Security instead. In December 2005 Zions entered Texas with the purchase of Amegy Bank.

The years after 2008 brought restructuring. Zions received federal funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program on 27 October 2008 and repaid the last of them on 26 September 2012, Wikipedia says. In 2011 Zions Bank paid civil penalties after an investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency into its compliance with anti-money-laundering rules; the company said the failures were not intentional, according to Wikipedia. On 1 June 2015 Zions announced a restructuring that consolidated its seven bank charters into a single charter, and in October 2018 the holding company merged into its bank, which became Zions Bancorporation, N.A. Wikipedia notes that it now operates as a national bank rather than as a bank holding company.

How regional banks present themselves.

US regional banks tend to present themselves through place. Many carry a state, a city or a region in their names, or keep the name of the town where they were founded long after they have spread across several states. Their identities usually rest on a short wordmark in blue, green or red, set beside photographs of local streets, branch staff, small-business owners and families buying homes. Founding years matter too: several of the banks in this guide trace their roots to the nineteenth century, and their histories are told through the names they have carried since.

Their websites follow a familiar pattern. Pages for checking and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans sit alongside sections for commercial lending, treasury services and wealth management, so that one brand speaks both to households and to companies. Several of the banks in this guide also run more than one name: local brands kept after a merger, or a single brand carried into new states.

Visibility outside the branch often comes through sponsorship. Ballparks, arenas, theatres and arts seasons have carried bank names, and those names change when banks merge. Annual reports, community reports and investor presentations form a second public record, setting out where a bank operates, which brands it uses and how it describes its history.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, which mergers shaped it, and what has happened to its name — and keeps the bank’s own claims separate from what dated sources report. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own.

One bank, several local names.

Zions keeps its local names even after folding them into one bank. Wikipedia, citing the company’s annual report for 2022, lists seven brands. Four are Zions Bank, Amegy Bank of Texas, California Bank & Trust and National Bank of Arizona; the other three are Nevada State Bank, Vectra Bank Colorado and the Commerce Bank of Washington. In a release of 3 August 2026, the company described itself as operating “under local management teams and distinct brands” in 11 western states, from Arizona and California to Washington and Wyoming.

That release announced that Zions had completed the purchase of Basis Investment Group’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac multifamily lending business, adding agency lending for owners, operators and developers of apartment buildings. The company says it is included in the S&P MidCap 400 and NASDAQ Financial 100 indices, and points readers to its corporate website for links to its local banking brands.

The name is the thread through all of it. Zion’s Savings Bank opened in 1873; the apostrophe went in 1957; church ownership ended in 1960; the holding company became Zions Bancorporation in 1965; and in 2018 the bank and the holding company became one. Across those changes the Zions name stayed on the Utah bank while other states kept names of their own.

For a design guide, Zions shows how a parent can keep several regional names under one charter and let one historic name lead at home. Compare Wells Fargo, which sold Zions branches in 1997 and bought First Security after Zions’s bid failed, and U.S. Bank, another bank with deep western roots. For this guide we use a deep slate blue and a sandstone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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