Techcombank Annual Report: Designing for the Big Idea, Not the Brief
What We Believe
Annual reports are one of those projects that most companies treat as a box to check. The content comes from legal, finance, and IR, a designer gets brought in toward the end to arrange it into something presentable, and the output is usually fine but forgettable. It covers what it needs to cover, and nobody comes back to it after the first read.
We think that is a missed opportunity. For a publicly listed corporation, the annual report is the only document that tells the full story of the business in a single place, reaching investors, regulators, partners, and internal teams all at once. That makes it one of the most important pieces of communication a company puts out each year, and it deserves to be treated that way.
What separates a report people actually engage with from one that gets filed away usually comes down to whether it was built around a concept that came from the business strategy, or whether the design was layered on top of content that never had a unifying idea to begin with. At mg.limited, we always start with the concept and let the design follow from there.
How It Works in Practice
Techcombank is one of Vietnam’s leading private banks, and we have designed their annual report for two consecutive years. Both times the project started the same way: not with a visual brief, but with a conversation about what the bank had achieved that year and where it was heading.
Each year brought a different business context, and a different concept. The through-line across both was the same approach: understand the strategy first, then build a design system that makes that strategy feel real on every page.
In 2023, Techcombank was turning 30 while in the middle of a five-year transformation built on data, digital, and talent, and the challenge was to mark the milestone without making the report feel like a retrospective.
The concept (given by the IR team as “Reaching for New Heights”) connected the bank’s history to its forward direction and shaped everything downstream, from the cover and chapter structure to the photography and layout system.
In 2024, the business context had moved on. The bank was deep into AI integration, customer-centric product design, and sustainable growth, so we brought two concept directions to the table and worked closely with Techcombank’s communications team to arrive at the chosen concept.
Different year, different strategy, different concept; the same approach: understand the business first, then design around it.
Two teams,
one story.
What made both projects work was the collaboration between the two teams. We brought the creative thinking and strategic framing while Techcombank’s team brought the business knowledge and institutional context that kept every concept honest. The concept and the content grew together from the start, which is the only way a 200-page document ends up feeling like one coherent story rather than a collection of sections stitched together at the end.
For corporations that take their annual report seriously, the real question is whether the team behind it understands the business well enough to find the one idea that makes the whole document hold together.
That is what we do, and in our experience, that is where the value actually sits.
