Pentagram was appointed by Rabobank - the second largest high street bank in Holland - to redefine the design language of their consumer branches, for nation-wide roll-out across all formats. The new interiors have been designed to provide customers with a consistent experience of the brand and to differentiate Rabobank from its competitors in order to maintain a strong, competitive presence within their retail oriented, high street context. This led to the development of expressive, contemporary environments.

The new design language is flexible enough to work across all of Rabobank’s formats to maintain a consistent presence in the high street. Full-height frameless glazing provides passers-by with clear views of the open, generous interior volumes, creating a friendlier, livelier customer experience. Large scale graphics and dramatic lighting energise the space. Semi-enclosed consultancy stations replace traditionally enclosed meeting areas, whilst ATMs replace tellers. Furniture was selected to suggest the tone of a domestic work environment.

By opening up the interiors and removing the institutional overtones of a traditional bank, the designers endeavored to make each branch location as flexible as possible and to encourage out-of-hours usage for bank sponsored customer events, seminars and presentations. The new design language enables the three-dimensional communication of the Rabobank brand across three main formats: the Advice Centre, Mini Advice Centre and the Rabobank shop-in-shop. The Advice Centre is the fullest expression of the brand, with a waiting area that has been scaled up into a customer destination/service space.

The Mini Advice Centre is a distillation of the constituent parts of the flagship Advice Centre, whilst the Rabobank shop-in-shop is an entirely new concept: compact, relatively informal, and representative of the more populist aspects of the brand. An initial ten-store pilot scheme proved successful, and the scheme is subsequently rolling-out across Rabobank’s 1500 nation-wide branches.