TBi credit
An identity face-lift and a clearer architecture for a consumer-credit group
TBI arrived in Romania as a foreign-backed specialist in a market moving at full speed. Owned by the Dutch group TBIF Financial Services, part of Kardan, it built its consumer-finance business on two non-banking institutions — TBI Leasing, opened in Bucharest in 2002, and TBI Credit, launched the following year — just as Romanian household credit entered its steepest boom. The lending was growing faster than the name. In a category crowded with universal banks and captive lenders whose brands did half the selling for them, TBI was buying visibility it could not keep.
Brandient worked at the level of architecture, not cosmetics. Presented as two separate identities, with the generic category descriptors — credit, leasing — carrying more visual weight than the corporate name itself, the group’s fast-growing visibility had two half-brands to land on instead of one; consolidation would let every impression it bought compound into a single equity.
Brandient’s answer was consolidation: a monolithic architecture with the single corporate brand as the equity carrier, and the credit and leasing lines as supporting extensions differentiated through disciplined color-coding rather than separate identities. Strategically, Brandient framed the group as the functional, dynamic challenger of Romanian financial services — fast, flexible and reachable where the incumbents were slow and formal — with a verbal territory built on financing aspirations: turning plans into reality.
The identity face-lift followed from that business case rather than from taste. Greater visual weight and contrast bought the brand presence at street and retail level, where consumer credit is actually sold; a cleaner, more structured logo and a more tolerant typographic system let one identity work across every product, format and branch; and advertising shifted from product level to corporate level, so that each campaign built the institution instead of another disconnected offer.
The discipline outlived the engagement. The TBI name went on to carry the group into banking — tbi bank, created in 2011 and lending in Romania from 2012 — through a change of ownership in 2016, and across today’s footprint in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, where banking, credit and leasing still trade under the single corporate brand. One name, one equity carrier: the architecture argued for in 2007 is, in effect, the one the group still runs on.
Client:
TBI Leasing IFN · TBI Credit IFN
Industry:
Banking, Financial Services and Fintech
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Upgrade
Date:
2007
Services:
Brand and Portfolio Architecture · Logo and Visual Identity Program · Corporate ID Program
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