BTG Pactual Brand Guidelines: A 1983 Rio Brokerage, UBS and the 2009 Buyback

A Rio brokerage, a Swiss owner and a buyback.

BTG Pactual began in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 as Pactual DTVM, a securities brokerage. Portuguese Wikipedia names its founders as Luiz Cezar Fernandes, André Jacurski and Paulo Guedes, and says the partners agreed from the start that the firm would run as a meritocratic partnership: staff who performed well over time were invited to buy shares and become partners. Its first business was proprietary trading and securities sales and trading. English Wikipedia says asset management and investment banking followed in 1986, a São Paulo office in 1989 and wealth management in the mid-1990s.

In June 1998 the firm’s executive team was replaced by a new group of partners, and the bank began to build its client businesses — asset management, investment banking and wealth management — alongside trading, as a way to spread its sources of income, Portuguese Wikipedia says.

In December 2006 the Swiss bank UBS bought Banco Pactual, and the business became UBS Pactual. In June 2008 a group of former UBS and UBS Pactual partners set up BTG Investments — the initials stand for Banking and Trading Group — as an alternative asset manager. In May 2009 BTG Investments closed the purchase of UBS Pactual, a deal Portuguese Wikipedia says the Banco Central do Brasil approved in October that year, and the combined bank took the name Banco BTG Pactual. Several of Pactual’s earlier partners stayed on in the new firm.

A listing, Andean brokerages and a digital bank.

The rebuilt bank grew quickly. In December 2010 it raised new equity from a group of international investors, including sovereign funds and family offices, while the partners kept control, Portuguese Wikipedia says. In 2011 it took a controlling stake in Banco PanAmericano, now Banco PAN, sharing control with the state bank Caixa Econômica Federal.

In April 2012 BTG Pactual listed on the São Paulo exchange, now B3, selling units that combined shares in two companies, Banco BTG Pactual S.A. and the offshore BTG Pactual Participations. Portuguese Wikipedia calls it the largest Brazilian listing since 2009 at the time. That year it also bought the Chilean investment bank Celfin Capital and the Colombian brokerage Bolsa y Renta. In 2013 its Timberland Investment Group took over forest asset management contracts from Regions Bank in the United States, and in 2014 it bought the British reinsurer Ariel Re and the Swiss private bank BSI.

BSI did not stay long. English Wikipedia says the group faced regulatory challenges over BSI’s earlier dealings with the Malaysian state fund 1MDB, and BTG Pactual sold BSI to EFG International in 2016.

On 25 November 2015 the bank’s then chief executive was arrested by Brazil’s federal police in an investigation connected to the Petrobras corruption inquiry. The Straits Times, carrying a Reuters report the next day, said the bank’s listed shares fell sharply and that BTG Pactual confirmed the arrest and said it was available to cooperate with the investigation. Portuguese Wikipedia says a federal judge in Brasília acquitted him of obstruction of justice in July 2018 for lack of evidence, and that he returned to the bank’s controlling group in 2019.

The bank turned towards retail clients in the same decade. Its online investment platform, BTG Pactual Digital, opened to employees in March 2015 and to the general public in December 2016, aimed at investors the bank had never served directly, Portuguese Wikipedia says. In 2020 it launched a digital retail banking app, BTG+. In 2022 BTG Digital stopped being a separate brand and the group unified its brands under the BTG Pactual name, bringing personal and business accounts together; Portuguese Wikipedia dates the end of that integration to 2023. In September 2020, the same source says, BTG Pactual became the first Latin American investment bank to sign the United Nations Principles for Responsible Banking.

How Latin American banks present themselves.

Latin American banks tend to present themselves through a few strong signals rather than many small ones. A bold wordmark or a simple symbol, set in one dominant colour, does most of the work: reds, blues, oranges and yellows recur across the region, sometimes chosen to echo a national flag, as English Wikipedia says of Banco do Brasil’s blue and yellow. Some banks go further and commission their own typefaces, as Bradesco did with Bradesco Sans in 2020, according to the Brazilian site B9.

The copy is written in Spanish or Portuguese first, and the photography is local: branches, city streets, customers at work and families at home. Product pages are built around the same practical headings almost everywhere — accounts, cards, credit, insurance and the bank’s own digital apps.

Banks in the region also present a public side that goes beyond banking products. Financial-inclusion programmes, foundations and cultural institutes appear alongside the commercial pages; Fundação Bradesco has worked in education since 1956, and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil runs cultural centres in several Brazilian cities. Sport sponsorship, from national teams to motor racing, carries the colours further still.

Many of these banks are listed companies, so annual and integrated reports are part of the identity too, setting out history, ownership and governance in a consistent house style. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it and how it presents itself — and treats its palette as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

A partnership with a listed bank attached.

The group is headquartered in São Paulo, on Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, and keeps its long-standing office on Praia de Botafogo in Rio, Portuguese Wikipedia says; the same source describes a presence in at least twelve countries, among them the United States, Chile, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Argentina, Colombia and Peru. Its business lines are investment banking, corporate lending, sales and trading, asset management and wealth management, plus forestry assets run by the Timberland Investment Group. English Wikipedia says the group is formed by Banco BTG Pactual, the main operating company, and BTG Pactual Participations. The partnership model remains: Portuguese Wikipedia says partners’ stakes are reviewed each year according to individual performance, and new partners are invited in.

Its latest step abroad is a bank of its own in the United States. In January 2026 Pulse 2.0 reported that BTG Pactual had completed its purchase of M.Y. Safra Bank of New York, first announced in June 2024, after receiving all required approvals, including from the Federal Reserve Board. The bank was renamed BTG Pactual Bank, N.A. and can take deposits and make loans directly in the American market; BTG Pactual said it had been present in the country since 2009 through broker-dealer and asset management firms based in New York and Miami.

For a design guide, BTG Pactual shows how a bank built as a trading partnership came to present one name across investment banking, wealth management and a retail app, after folding its separate digital brand into the parent in 2022 — with the initials of the Banking and Trading Group set in front of the Pactual name it bought back from UBS. Compare Itaú, another São Paulo bank, and Nubank, the São Paulo digital bank. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate blue and a warm stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BTG Pactual’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.