The Bank of New York: a personality split

New:  A second logo, to differentiate the corporation and its global institutional services business from its local retail bank.

Launched:  January 25, 2005

Story in brief:
It's the story of a split personality. One side is a local retail banking system, the linear descendant of the bank founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton and friends.  Its strongest franchise is still among the city's older families. The other side competes in global services to institutional investors, such as 'back office' processing for mutual funds.  (Its principal competitor in this specialty, State Street Corporation, resolved a similar personality split by closing its retail bank.)

More to come, as we hear more from 'BNY' and from Lippincott Mercer, on the leadership direction and design brief...

Credits:
C.E.O.: Thomas A. Renyi
Identity counsel and design - Lippincott Mercer

First Impressions:
It's certainly decorative, and evokes stock certificates and such. But such imagery is a bit backward-looking, I would think, for a business so predicated on innovative technologies. And I wonder about Mr. Renyi's thinking in prolonging the "New York" association (and incidentally, the counterproductive "The"), for an institution whose ambitions are so assertively global.

Technically, the new mark is a challenge. It reduces poorly, and the charm of its colored security pattern is lost in B&W.  Implementation design will be all-important; in Connie Birdsall's hands, it will be elegant.

Strategically, the new mark separates the corporation into two cultures and in doing so, it appears to promote as well as to facilitate a sale of the retail business.

 Other comments?
Consultant William Agush:
"This is another example of a disturbing trend in identity -- complex, multi-color marks that look terrific on business cards but can't deliver on newsprint or cut stainless steel. And I can hardly imagine the new BNY mark on a pen (let's face it, logos wind up on a gazillion pens). I still hew to the belief that more than 50% of all identity applications will be black and white, and marks that can't be rendered powerfully in shades of gray will wind up in the identity scrap yard."