Caixa Geral de Depósitos Brand Guidelines: Portugal’s State-Owned Bank Since 1876

A public office for deposits.

Caixa Geral de Depósitos was created in Lisbon by a law of 10 April 1876, in the reign of King Luís, according to Portuguese Wikipedia. Its original purpose was narrow: to receive compulsory deposits, the sums that the law or the courts required to be lodged, and no public body was allowed to order or permit such deposits anywhere else. It could also take voluntary deposits, up to a limit per depositor. It was first run by the Junta do Crédito Público, the public-debt board, and it took over from the older public deposit offices of Lisbon and Porto. Portuguese Wikipedia says its organisation drew on similar institutions abroad, notably the French Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations of 1816 and the Belgian Caisse Générale d’Épargne et de Retraite of 1865.

A savings arm followed. A law of 1880 created the Caixa Económica Portuguesa, with separate funds, to take small voluntary deposits and encourage saving among poorer households, English and Portuguese Wikipedia say; in 1885 its funds were brought together with those of the Caixa, merging the two in practice.

A law of 21 May 1896 gave the Caixa its autonomy from the Junta, with its own board for the first time. It also took on the Caixa Geral de Aposentações, a pension fund, and the Monte de Piedade Nacional, a public pawn-lending office, and for a time carried the longer name Caixa Geral de Depósitos e Instituições de Previdência. A reform of 1918 separated those services again, restored the short name and widened its lending, including mortgage, farm and industrial credit, Portuguese Wikipedia says. A further reform in 1929 renamed it Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Crédito e Previdência, a name it kept until 1993, and from that point, the same article says, the Caixa began to establish itself as a credit institution rather than mainly a lender to the State.

From public service to state-owned company.

The Caixa’s legal form changed twice in the late twentieth century. An organic law of April 1969 turned it from a public service, run under the same rules as government departments, into a public enterprise for credit, with management run on business lines, Portuguese Wikipedia says. A decree of August 1993 then made it Caixa Geral de Depósitos, S.A., a public limited company whose capital is wholly public and may be held only by the State, governed by the same rules as private banks and working as a universal bank. The pension fund was separated from it in the same year.

The group grew around it. Portuguese Wikipedia dates its start to 1982, with the leasing company Locapor, and records that in 1988 the Caixa took majority stakes in the insurer Fidelidade and in Banco Nacional Ultramarino. BNU was merged into the Caixa in 2001 and its name disappeared, except in Macau, where BNU continues as a universal bank and an issuer of the local currency.

Abroad, English Wikipedia lists a Paris branch from 1975; Spanish purchases including Banco de Extremadura in 1991 and Banco Simeón of Vigo in 1995, combined in 2002 and renamed Banco Caixa Geral in 2006; a bank in Mozambique set up in 1997; a branch in Dili, East Timor, opened in 2001; and a controlling stake in South Africa’s Mercantile Lisbon Bank Holdings in 2004. Portuguese Wikipedia describes a presence weighted towards countries with close cultural or trading ties to Portugal, including Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Brazil.

At home the Caixa built remote banking early, with the Caixadirecta service by telephone, internet and mobile, and a share in the national Multibanco cash network, according to Portuguese Wikipedia.

Its most visible cultural project is Culturgest, which opened in October 1993. Culturgest describes itself as a private-law foundation set up by the Caixa, which gives it an annual grant and the use of its buildings; it programmes theatre, dance, music, visual art and cinema in Lisbon and Porto and looks after the Caixa’s art collection, which includes Júlio Pomar’s Tropel paintings.

Design and documentation.

Spanish and Portuguese banks tend to present themselves through a strong wordmark and a small set of colours, most often a blue, a red or a green. Many of today’s names are recent: BBVA settled on a single initialism for every market in 2019, and CaixaBank took its name in 2011, yet both carry much older histories, in the case of BBVA back to Banco de Bilbao in 1857.

Savings-bank and regional heritage runs deep in the sector. Several of the banks in this guide grew out of the cajas and caixas, the savings banks that served a city or a region, and mergers have often kept old local names on the branches of their home territory. Foundations formed from those savings banks remain shareholders in some of the banks and fund cultural, scientific and social work, such as the la Caixa Foundation and its CaixaForum centres.

On their own websites the banks give most space to everyday banking: current accounts, cards, mortgages, savings and the mobile apps that now carry much of the business, often with digital-only brands beside the main one. Branch fronts and head-office buildings in the banks’ home cities appear often in their photography, and sponsorship of football, basketball and other sports keeps their names in public view.

For the design-minded, the useful material sits in the banks’ corporate sections: brand pages, press releases about new logos, and the annual reports that every listed bank publishes. This guide reads those alongside independent dated sources; the palettes are our own unofficial interpretations, and no logo or mark is reproduced.

Owned by the State, supervised in Frankfurt.

The Caixa remains wholly owned by the Portuguese State. English Wikipedia calls it the largest bank in Portugal, and Culturgest describes its founder in the same terms, as the country’s largest banking institution, owned by the Portuguese State. Since late 2014 it has been designated a significant institution and directly supervised by the European Central Bank, English Wikipedia says.

The euro-area debt crisis reached it too. English Wikipedia records state support measures from 2009 and a recapitalisation by the government that the European Commission approved in 2012. In August 2016 the Commission and the Portuguese authorities reached an agreement in principle on a further recapitalisation of the bank on market terms, with cost cutting and measures to reduce risk, Algarve Daily News reported on 24 August 2016. In 2004 the group also took over several insurers from Banco Comercial Português, which that bank lists among its disposals of the year.

Its role in the wider economy shows in its partners. In November 2024 the European Investment Bank announced a guarantee for the Caixa to widen its lending to mid-sized companies and public bodies in Portugal, and an EIB director general called the Caixa “one of our most trusted partners in Portugal.”

Its origins remain part of its character. The Caixa was created by law, as an office of the State for deposits that the courts and public bodies required, and 150 years later its capital is still held entirely by the State. Through Culturgest, which presents a regular programme of contemporary work and commissions pieces from visual artists, the bank also keeps a public presence in the arts in Lisbon and Porto.

For a design guide, Caixa Geral de Depósitos shows how a public deposit office can grow into a modern universal bank while keeping its short, plain name, “Caixa.” Compare Millennium bcp, the private bank founded in Portugal more than a century later, and Santander, another Iberian bank. For this guide we use navy, a deep Atlantic blue and a muted gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Caixa Geral de Depósitos’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.