Banca Transilvania rebranded from strength, not crisis
Bucharest, September 2016
Coming off a strong 2015, the largest Romanian bank built on private capital chose a moment of confidence to evolve — and the brief was to sharpen, not reinvent: to make its hard-won associations unmistakable. In Brandient’s second engagement with BT’s president, Horia Ciorcilă, the work protected what already carried equity — the “shield” symbol and the signature yellow — and built outward, enriching the palette toward the national colours (blue, yellow, red) so the bank could own, on sight, the leadership it had earned as a Romanian, local bank for entrepreneurial Romanians.
The new visual identity aims to accentuate the charismatic and vibrant personality that defines both the Romanian entrepreneurial spirit and BT’s team. The new logo inspired a generous graphical platform, bearing brand property value, able to ensure stylistic consistency in all the brand’s manifestations. The “trust” component, that defines the banking sector, is supported at visual level by solid typography and compositional rigor.
—Ciprian Badalan, Design Director Brandient
Beyond refreshing the look, the project’s mandate was consistency and discipline across the brand’s complex manifestations. The harder part of a corporate rebrand, though, is rarely the design — it is the organisation:
Corporate brand identity projects involve considerable time and human resources, lack of comfort within the organization, as well as a lot of subjectivity. Under such circumstances, it was a huge help to have a brand that is cherished by its organization, and to work with a Board that decides not by committee, but through ambition, aspiration and faith.
—Aneta Bogdan FCIM Managing Partner Brandient
Read more about the design process in the case study on our website.
Brandient is the award-winning brand strategy and design company, with offices in Bucharest and Singapore. Find out more about us and about our work.
About Brandient
Brandient is an independent brand strategy and design consultancy founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Aneta Bogdan, Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — never part of a global network, working directly for the owners, CEOs and boards of its clients, with an all-senior team and category exclusivity. In over two decades the firm has created or rebuilt more than 300 brands, 279 of them published as case studies at brandient.com/work — from Romania’s national leaders to brands carried worldwide. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. The work has earned 84 international awards and distinctions — most recently a Red Dot (2025) and two Graphis Golds (2026) — 64 documented mentions in international design books and publications, and, in 2015, a place among the inaugural inductees of the REBRAND Hall of Fame, alongside Interbrand and MetaDesign.
About Banca Transilvania
Banca Transilvania is Romania’s largest bank — founded in 1994 in Cluj by Romanian entrepreneurs, grown organically and through a series of bank and financial-institution acquisitions — most recently OTP Bank Romania in 2025 — to some 23 percent of the banking system’s assets, and rated by Brand Finance as the country’s strongest brand of any kind and its most valuable banking brand. Brandient’s work with the bank has been continuous since the 2016 brand upgrade — the NeoBT digital brand (2019), the 2022 communication-design platform, the Star Card reconstruction (2023), the card-portfolio redesign (2024–2025) and internal brand-engagement programs along the way; Brandient’s work also ran through the banks BT acquired — Idea Bank, localized in 2014–2015, and Moldova’s Victoriabank, rebranded in 2019: the Banca Transilvania case, the Idea Bank case, the Victoriabank case.