CaixaBank Brand Guidelines: A Miró Star, la Caixa Roots and a Bank Formed in 2011

A Catalan pension and savings society, founded in 1904.

CaixaBank is young as a bank but old as an institution. Its roots are in the Caixa de Pensions per a la Vellesa, an old-age pension and savings society founded in Catalonia in 1904 by Francesc Moragas, which opened to the public in 1905. The bank’s own history page uses the Spanish form of the name, Caja de Pensiones para la Vejez, and counts its age from that date, calling CaixaBank “a bank with 120 years of history.” English Wikipedia says the savings bank spread to the Balearic Islands in 1915, that its social programme, the Obra Social, was formally created in 1918, and that it made its first merger outside Catalonia in 1930.

The company lists the years from 1936 as a time of difficulty and stagnation during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards it moved early into technology. The bank says it began computerising in 1962, and English Wikipedia says that in 1969 it became the first in Europe to process transactions in real time, so customers could bank at any branch. The company dates its first credit cards to 1975 and its first cash machines to 1979.

In 1990 the Caixa de Pensions, by then widely known as “la Caixa”, merged with the Caixa de Barcelona, a savings bank founded in 1844; the merged Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona kept the “la Caixa” name. It opened its first offices abroad, in Porto and Brussels, in 1995, according to Wikipedia, and the company dates its first website to 1997.

From Criteria CaixaCorp to the bank of today.

The listed company that became CaixaBank started as Criteria CaixaCorp, a vehicle for la Caixa’s shareholdings, which began trading on 10 October 2007. On 27 January 2011, as Spain restructured its savings banks, la Caixa announced that its banking business would pass to that listed company, renamed CaixaBank. Wikipedia says the bank kept using “la Caixa” in its branches and with retail customers, while the CaixaBank name was at first kept for institutional use. In 2014 the savings bank became a banking foundation, the “la Caixa” Foundation, which holds its CaixaBank shares through the holding company Criteria Caixa.

Mergers followed. In 2012 CaixaBank took over Banca Cívica, the group formed by savings banks including Cajasol, Caja Navarra, CajaCanarias and Caja de Burgos; in 2013 it absorbed Banco de Valencia, which Spain’s bank restructuring fund had recapitalised in 2012; and in May 2015 it completed the absorption of Barclays Bank’s Spanish business. In Portugal it gained control of Banco BPI through an offer accepted in February 2017 and owned all of the bank by December 2018, Spanish Wikipedia says.

On 6 October 2017 the bank decided to move its registered office from Barcelona to Valencia, where it remains, with operational offices in Barcelona and Madrid, according to Wikipedia. Then came Bankia. CaixaBank and Bankia, the bank that included the former Caja Madrid and was then majority-owned by the Spanish state, confirmed merger talks in September 2020. Spain’s competition authority approved the deal on 23 March 2021, the merger deed was registered in Valencia on 26 March, and the CaixaBank brand had replaced Bankia’s by June 2021, Spanish Wikipedia says. The la Caixa Foundation, through Criteria Caixa, is the largest shareholder; the Spanish state, through its bank restructuring fund, also holds a stake.

How Spanish and Portuguese banks present themselves.

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.

A star by Joan Miró, adopted in 1982.

CaixaBank’s symbol is older than the bank. The company says that in 1982 a star designed by the artist Joan Miró became the new symbol of the savings bank. La Vanguardia described it in May 2026 as a five-pointed star suggesting a blue human figure, accompanied by two coloured dots. The star belongs to la Caixa: the newspaper reported that CaixaBank uses it, together with the la Caixa mark, under a licence agreement with its owner first signed in 2014 and revised by the bank’s board at the end of April 2026, for which the bank pays an annual fee.

The star has travelled with the bank’s mergers. Banca Cívica’s old savings-bank names were shown beside the la Caixa symbol in their home regions, and after Banco de Valencia was absorbed, branches in the Murcia region took the name Banco de Murcia next to the star, Wikipedia says. From 2015 the CaixaBank name was rolled out progressively across the branch network, and in 2021 it replaced Bankia’s name on the merged bank’s branches.

The bank has also built names for particular customers: AgroBank, launched in 2014 for farming areas with visually distinct branches; HolaBank, presented in 2015 for international customers who are not resident in Spain; and imaginBank, announced in 2016 as a bank built to be used only from a mobile phone. The company lists imagin, a digital and lifestyle platform, under 2020. Sponsorship includes Spain’s football federation and national team, backed in 2006–09 and 2018–24, Spanish Wikipedia says, and the Valencian pelota league now called the Liga CaixaBank.

Culture and social work run through the wider group. The la Caixa Foundation funds social, cultural and scientific projects from its holdings, the company dates the opening of CaixaForum Barcelona to 2002, and the foundation has been based in Barcelona since March 2025, according to Wikipedia.

For a design guide, CaixaBank shows how an artist’s symbol can outlast several names and carry a savings-bank heritage into a listed bank. Compare BBVA and Santander, two other Spanish banks. For this guide we use a mid blue, a warm red and a sunny yellow on a pale ground with a humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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