La Banque Postale Brand Guidelines: Postal Savings, a 2006 Bank & CNP Assurances

Postal savings, postal cheques, a 2006 bank.

La Banque Postale is young as a bank but old as a service. French Wikipedia traces its roots to the financial services of the French post: the postal money order, used from 1817; savings collected in post offices from 1875; the Caisse nationale d’épargne, a national savings bank run by the postal administration from 1881; and the postal cheque account, the compte courant postal, created by a law of 7 January 1918 and run from regional cheque centres, the CCP. The Livret A savings book, which replaced the older savings book from 1 January 1966, became a household name, French Wikipedia says.

The services changed as banking opened up. French Wikipedia records small overdrafts allowed in the 1960s and 1970s, a network of cash machines from 1975, cards issued on the Visa network from 1984 and remote banking by Minitel from 1989. A law of 2 July 1990 made La Poste a public body with financial autonomy, and in the early 2000s its financial services were grouped under a single holding company.

The bank itself was created under a law of 20 May 2005 on postal regulation, which provided for a La Poste subsidiary to take over all the assets, rights and obligations of its financial services. The European Commission authorised the move on 21 December 2005, French Wikipedia says, and La Banque Postale was born on 31 December 2005; the bank dates its creation to 2006. It says it was formed by the legal transformation of Efiposte, an investment firm set up in 2000 to manage La Poste’s current-account deposits. Its head office is the Hôtel de Choiseul-Praslin in Paris, an eighteenth-century town house that once housed the national savings bank and was chosen in 2006 for the new bank, French Wikipedia says.

A public mission written into law.

La Banque Postale describes itself as a public bank with a civic identity, and part of that is a legal duty. A law of 4 August 2008 gave it alone a mission of banking accessibility, French Wikipedia says: it must open a Livret A for anyone who asks and allow small deposits and withdrawals on it free of charge. The bank says it is the only bank in France with such a mission written into law, and that it supports customers in financial difficulty through a platform called L’Appui, launched in 2013.

The range widened step by step. French Wikipedia says the bank could offer all kinds of home loans from the start, consumer credit from 2007, property insurance from 2009 and lending to companies and other legal entities from 2010. The bank’s own timeline names the partners: a consumer credit business with Société Générale in 2009 and property insurance with Groupama in 2010. From 2012 it lent to local authorities and public hospitals, through a business set up with the Caisse des Dépôts under an agreement with Dexia, and the bank says it has been the main bank lender to local authorities and public hospitals since 2015.

Not every venture lasted. The bank bought the private bank BPE from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2013 and the crowdfunding platform KissKissBankBank in 2017, and launched the mobile bank Ma French Bank in 2019. French Wikipedia says KissKissBankBank was sold to Ulule in November 2024 and that Ma French Bank closed on 10 July 2025. Today the bank names three brands: La Banque Postale for everyday banking, Louvre Banque Privée for private banking and CNP Assurances for insurance.

How French banks present themselves.

French banks tend to present themselves through a small set of strong signals: a confident wordmark, a simple symbol and one or two colours used with discipline. Green, red and blue recur across the sector. Crédit Agricole is sometimes called “la banque verte,” the green bank, for its farming roots, while Société Générale has used a red and black square since 1990, according to French Wikipedia. The result is a high street where a colour can identify a bank before its name is read.

Many of the largest groups are mutualist or cooperative, built from local and regional banks owned by their members, and their identities often carry that structure. A national mark sits above regional names, and branch signage, city photography and local news pages speak to a particular town or département. The same brand has to work on a village branch, a city tower and a phone screen.

Online, the pages follow everyday needs: current accounts and cards, home loans, insurance, savings and investment, with separate areas for professionals, farmers and companies. Mobile apps now carry much of the relationship, and app screens, notifications and onboarding flows have become part of the visual identity as much as the logo on a branch front.

Sponsorship gives these brands a public stage. Crédit Agricole has backed football’s Coupe de France since 1974, according to English Wikipedia, and Société Générale says it has sponsored the French Rugby Federation since 1987; culture, music and disability sport also feature. Annual and integrated reports complete the picture: long documents in which the group’s colours, typefaces and photography are applied with the same care as on a campaign poster, and a useful place to study how each identity holds together.

CNP Assurances and a public financial group.

Insurance became the second pillar. In August 2018 the French government announced plans to bring La Banque Postale and the insurer CNP Assurances together within a larger public financial group, English and French Wikipedia say. On 4 March 2020 the change took effect: La Banque Postale became CNP’s majority shareholder, with 62.13 percent, English Wikipedia says, a step the bank’s own timeline also dates to 2020. On 16 December 2021 La Banque Postale announced that it had bought the stake held by BPCE. It then filed a simplified tender offer for the remaining shares with the French market authority, the AMF, on 16 March 2022, CNP Assurances’ investor pages show; the AMF published the result on 3 June 2022 and a squeeze-out followed, leaving the bank with 100 percent and CNP Assurances delisted. In 2023 the bank grouped CNP and its own insurance units in CNP Assurances Holding, its timeline says.

Ownership sits with the post. The bank says the La Poste group holds all its capital and voting rights, and that La Poste itself is owned 66 percent by the Caisse des Dépôts and 34 percent by the French state. It became an entreprise à mission, a company with a stated purpose written into its articles, in 2022, and it serves customers through about 17,000 points of contact, including about 6,500 post offices, the bank says. Its strategic plan is called “La Banque Postale 2030,” and in 2026 it marks its twentieth anniversary.

There have been regulatory findings. French Wikipedia says France’s banking supervisor, the ACPR, fined the bank in May 2017 over shortcomings in advice to private customers, and in December 2018 issued a reprimand and a fine over serious weaknesses in detecting transactions by people subject to asset freezes, mainly linked to its “mandat cash” money-transfer service, which was later withdrawn.

For a design guide, La Banque Postale shows how a bank can carry a public service’s history into its identity. Compare Caisse d’Epargne, whose savings banks the post offices once collected deposits for, French Wikipedia says, and BPCE, whose CNP stake the bank bought. For this guide we use a deep postal blue, a warm yellow and paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep La Banque Postale’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.