When Oman opened its banking sector to Islamic finance, Bank Nizwa was set up under the direction of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos as the country’s first dedicated Islamic bank. It had no customers, no branches and no track record. It was also entering a market where Islamic banking was unfamiliar to most people and where the conventional banks already held the relationships. Everything had to be built from nothing: what the bank stood for, how it looked and spoke, and what it felt like to walk through its doors. The ambition went further than launching a bank. Bank Nizwa wanted to bring Islamic banking into the mainstream as a bank for everyone. It would set a new standard in the region by proving its principles through the way it behaved, a position its own strategy summed up as “We don’t say we are Islamic; we prove it through our actions.”
We started with an audit of the country, from Musandam in the north to Salalah in the south, and used it to define Bank Nizwa’s positioning, values and visual identity. That identity then had to become a place. We based the branch layout on the traditional houses of the Arabian Peninsula, which face inwards around an open courtyard. At the centre of each branch is a large, open space where customers are welcomed as guests and introduced to the bank, and the private conversations sit around its edge, so every visit moves naturally from the open centre to a private meeting. The three pilot branches opened in Qurum, Sohar and Nizwa in January 2013. We set out the whole approach in Environmental Brand Guidelines covering layout, customer journey, furniture and messaging, so every new branch would carry the same experience whatever its site. We then applied the brand to the new headquarters in Muscat from the ground up, across the working floors, the private and corporate banking suites and the CEO suite.
Bank Nizwa opened in January 2013 with those three branches. It reached ten within two years, ahead of its own schedule, and has since grown to 18. At the end of 2025 it held US$5.2 billion in assets, and Global Finance, which ranks it as Oman’s seventh-largest bank, named it the best Islamic financial institution in Oman for 2026. The bank that set out to prove its principles through its actions is now an established name in Omani banking.
