Davivienda Brand Guidelines: Bogotá 1972, the Casita Roja & a Scotiabank Combination

A savings-and-housing corporation, four cities and a new name.

Davivienda did not start life as a bank. According to English and Spanish Wikipedia, the Corporación Colombiana de Ahorro y Vivienda, known as Coldeahorro, was created in August 1972 and opened to the public on 15 November 1972, with a main office in Bogotá and one office each in Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla.

The name changed within months. On 30 January 1973, both Wikipedia editions say, Coldeahorro became the Corporación Colombiana de Ahorro y Vivienda, Davivienda. English Wikipedia explains the word as a compound of “da vivienda,” roughly “gives housing” in Spanish, so the promise of a home was built into the name itself. The corporation belongs to Grupo Bolívar, the Colombian financial and insurance group, which Semana described in November 2025 as having more than 80 years in the country’s financial sector.

Davivienda became a full bank, Banco Davivienda S.A., on 1 July 1997. It then grew by acquisition. Wikipedia records a merger with Banco Superior in May 2006, the purchase of the vehicle lender Confinanciera in November 2006, and the purchase of Granbanco–Bancafé from the Colombian state in 2006, with the merger completed on 27 August 2007. Bancafé brought corporate and farm lending and offices in Panama and Miami; the United States Federal Reserve allowed a Davivienda branch in Miami in 2010, and it opened in 2011. In 2012 Davivienda bought HSBC’s businesses in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras, which, with Panama, form its Central American network. In October 2024 it took full ownership of the payment gateway ePayco, Spanish Wikipedia says.

The little red house.

The centre of the Davivienda identity is a symbol, not a typeface. Wikipedia says the bank has used the Casita Roja, the “little red house,” as its national and international logo since 1973, the year the Davivienda name arrived. Semana repeated the date in November 2025 and described the house as a sign of banking close to ordinary people. The house later carried a slogan of its own: Spanish Wikipedia lists “La banca bajo un solo techo, el techo de la casita roja” (“banking under one roof, the roof of the little red house”) as the line used from 1997 to 2005, the years after the corporation became a bank.

Davivienda’s advertising has leaned on humour and football. Spanish Wikipedia gives its earliest slogan, used from 1972 to 1994, as “Donde está el ahorrador feliz” (“where the happy saver is”). In 1994, around the football World Cup, the bank launched the line that English Wikipedia also records: “Su dinero puede estar en el lugar equivocado” (“your money may be in the wrong place”), finished in Spanish with an invitation to bring it to Davivienda. Spanish Wikipedia says the campaign won awards and was revived for later tournaments, including a bewildered “correspondent” character introduced for the 2010 World Cup. Later lines were “Una banca multilatina” from 2012, for the launch in Central America and Miami, and “Una banca multilatina global” from 2025.

The second pillar is mobile money. Spanish Wikipedia says Davivienda launched DaviPlata, an electronic wallet that works between mobile phones and Davivienda cash machines, in February 2011 with the operator Claro, later adding Tigo and Movistar, and that the service became an app in 2016. Spanish Wikipedia now describes DaviPlata as a neobank. In November 2021 Davivienda announced Rappi Bank, a joint venture with the delivery app Rappi, for Colombia. For a designer, the lesson is consistency: one simple pictogram, one strong red and a long-running joke have carried the brand across savings, cards, a wallet and several countries.

How Latin American banks present themselves.

Latin American banks tend to present themselves through bold wordmarks and a small set of strong colours. Blues, reds, greens and yellows recur across the region’s banking brands, usually paired with a short name or acronym that has to work on a branch front, a debit card and an app icon alike. Many names are Spanish and carry a place, a nation or a founding purpose in them, and slogans are written for a home audience first.

Photography does much of the work. Bank websites and reports in the region often show branches, city streets and customers rather than abstract imagery, and some banks make a landmark headquarters building part of their public face. Financial-inclusion programmes — accounts for people new to banking, credit for small businesses, scholarships — are a recurring theme, presented alongside the core pages on accounts, cards, loans, remittances and mobile apps.

Sponsorship is another constant. Football leagues, stadiums and clubs carry bank names in several countries, and banks also run cultural foundations, art collections and exhibitions that put the brand in a setting far from the branch counter.

The paper trail matters too. Listed banks and the subsidiaries of international groups publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and these, together with dated press coverage and public histories, are what this guide draws on. Each entry sets out who founded the bank, who owns it now and how its name has changed, and marks what rests only on the bank’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown here are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own specifications.

From the Scotiabank agreement to DAVIbank and one bank.

The largest change in Davivienda’s history began on 6 January 2025, when Davivienda and Scotiabank announced an agreement under which Davivienda would take over Scotiabank Colpatria in Colombia and Scotiabank’s operations in Panama and Costa Rica, and Scotiabank would take a stake of about 20 per cent, subject to regulatory approval, Wikipedia says. Semana reported in November 2025 that the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia had granted the last required authorisations, under contracts between Grupo Bolívar, Banco Davivienda and The Bank of Nova Scotia.

The new structure was presented on 1 December 2025. Semana reported that Scotiabank Colpatria would be known as DAVIbank, that about 80 per cent of its offices already carried the new name, and that Davivienda and DAVIbank would sit side by side inside Davivienda Group, a listed holding company in which Scotiabank acquired a 20 per cent stake. The group was organised in three parts: DAVIbank, Davivienda, and Holding Davivienda Internacional for Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras. Infobae reported on 2 December 2025 that existing cards and online access would carry on unchanged, with new cards issued under the DAVIbank name.

The two banks did not stay separate for long. Forbes Colombia reported on 1 November 2026 that Banco Davivienda had completed the transfer of DAVIbank’s banking assets, liabilities and contracts, effective that day, under an authorisation from the financial superintendency dated 2 October 2026. Davivienda says the combined bank is the second-largest player in the Colombian financial system. DAVIbank’s shareholders approved on 31 October 2026 renaming the remaining company Lambda Bank S.A.; the change still had to be formally registered at the time of the report.

For a design guide, Davivienda shows how a single pictogram can hold a brand together through mergers, new markets and a name that changed hands. Compare it with the Andean Banco Pichincha and Peru’s Interbank. For this guide we use a house red, roof clay and charcoal with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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