Union Bank × Titan Trust

Bank mergers are a communications problem before they are a design problem. Customers do not read a merger announcement as corporate news — they read it as a question about whether their money is safe.

This one carried an added awkwardness. Titan Trust was significantly younger and smaller than Union Bank, and it had taken the majority stake. The combined institution would keep the Union Bank name and identity. So the announcement had to communicate a real change in ownership while making clear that the brand customers had banked with for a century was not going anywhere.

Get the tone wrong and it reads as one bank swallowing another. In a market where confidence is fragile, that is not an abstract risk.

Our copywriter, Daniel, developed a set of territories around the announcement. The one that held was "A Stronger Union" — a phrase that did two things at once. It used the bank's own name as its argument, and it reframed the transaction as a partnership rather than an acquisition.

That gave me the brief for the visual: make "stronger together" feel structurally true, not like reassurance written by a PR team.

The first direction I pushed was literal — two heads are better than one. A tennis racket with two heads. A bulb with two. These were fast, legible, and made the point, but they read as clever rather than reassuring, and cleverness was the wrong register for a customer worried about their savings.

The idea that won was a knot. Two strands — one in Titan's orange, one in Union's blue — tied into a single Hercules knot.

The Hercules knot is the one the Romans tied into a bride's girdle: their symbol of a union that could not be undone. It is a form that only exists because two separate things are holding each other. Neither strand disappears into the other; neither is subordinate. That was the entire argument of the merger, expressed in a shape rather than a sentence.

Practically, it also solved the brand problem. Two colours, one form — legible at thumbnail size in an app notification and at full-page scale in a national newspaper, without needing either logo to dominate.

The key visual carried the announcement across every channel the bank owned — social, press advertising, magazine print, digital display cascading down through every required size, and internal email templates for staff communications.

Internal mattered more than it usually does. Branch staff would be the ones answering customer questions, and they needed to see the same message their customers were seeing, framed the same way.

Alongside the merger work, the agency pitched the bank a sonic identity — the first by a Nigerian bank, and not a jingle. A tonal system built across five music genres so it could adapt to audiences in different regions while staying recognisably one sound. It was produced with award-winning composer Tee-Y Mix and launched as an EP with Boomplay.

A sound needs a face. I designed the visual campaign that gave The Sound of Union a presence across the bank's channels, translating an audio identity into something you could see on a poster and a phone screen.

The merger completed in 2022 under the Union Bank brand. The campaign line outlasted the announcement it was written for — the bank went on to frame its entire 105th year around it, publishing "Towards A Stronger Union — Year 105 in Review."

A line that starts as a campaign and ends up as the way a company describes itself is the most useful outcome this kind of work can have.