Recent years a series of scandals in the banking and financial world imply that banks as a category of service organizations need to increase transparency. The statutory financial statements ignores factors that may be of importance to create an image of a transparent and legitimate company which makes firms to embrace the opportunity and complement the financial statements with supplementary information. Since the company's survival depends largely on the legitimacy obtained from shareholders and investors, that is why banks’ actions must be consistent with shareholder and investors’ expectations and demands on the banks business. Reporting for intellectual capital through annual reports can contribute to a better insight into the organization and how does it behave with respect to shareholder and investor.The purpose of this paper is to create an understanding of how service organizations can create transparency and legitimacy through external reporting of intellectual capital. A case study of the four major banks in Sweden has been adopted during the study considering actor approach. The results were generated by textual analysis of the annual reports between 2002 and 2011 by applying a unique analysis method which consists of two encoding passes. The first coding was based on the identification of signals human, structural and customer capital in order to create a comprehensive picture of how the reporting of intellectual capital has changed over the years. By the second round signal characters in form of legitimacy-building strategies were identified: change the company, change perception or manipulate perception. The theoretical framework built on the agent, legitimate and signal theory was tested in the case studies result.An analysis of the signals and signal characters has shown that banks tend to increase transparency and create legitimacy primarily by emphasizing structural capital through the signal character – change perception. This means that banks are trying to inform shareholders and investors primarily through reporting of various processes, policies, programs or systems without demonstrating any changes in terms of structural capital. The study also underlines a strong link between the theories given that service organizations can reduce information gaps by signaling information requested on the market by shareholders and investors and thereby increase transparency which creates legitimacy.