Mirabaud Brand Guidelines: A Geneva Partnership Bank Traced to 1819

Two Geneva banking families.

Mirabaud dates itself to 1819 in Geneva, but the founder of that first house was not a Mirabaud. French Wikipedia, citing La Tribune de Genève, says the group’s origins lie in the firm Paccard, Ador & Cie, founded that year by David-Marc Paccard, who came from a family of bankers. The Mirabaud name arrived through partnership between two Geneva banking families: Louis-Henri Mirabaud, son of the Geneva banker Jacques Mirabaud, founded a bank in Paris in 1859, and his son Ivan Mirabaud became a partner in Paccard, Mirabaud et Cie in 1875.

The firm changed names as partners came and went. French Wikipedia records Paccard, Mirabaud, Puerari et Cie, a merger with the bank Louis d’Eichthal et fils in 1898, the constitution of Paccard, Mirabaud & Cie as bankers in Geneva on 15 February 1921 and, in 1929, the name Mirabaud Fils & Cie.

The bank took part in building Switzerland’s financial institutions. Its own timeline says it was a founding member of the country’s first stock exchange in 1857 and a co-founder of the Geneva Private Bankers Association in 1931; French Wikipedia adds that members of the family served as regents of the Banque de France until 1936. The sources used for this guide do not say how the bank conducted its business between 1933 and 1945.

Expansion abroad came late. The company says it launched an alternative fund in 1973 that clients can still buy, and French Wikipedia calls it one of the early movers in alternative management in Switzerland. Mirabaud opened its first office abroad, in Montreal, in 1985, and added London in 1990, Zurich in 1998, Paris in 2003, Basel in 2004 and Dubai in 2007, where it gained bank status in 2010, according to its timeline.

A partnership with unlimited liability.

Mirabaud is one of Geneva’s partnership banks, and that structure is part of its identity. In July 2013, French Wikipedia says, citing RTS and 24 heures, the bank announced a change of legal form; the company dates the change to 2014, when the group’s activities were placed under Mirabaud SCA, a Swiss partnership limited by shares. The company says the Managing Partners own and run the holding and carry full and unlimited liability at that level, alongside equity partners who hold management roles across the group. In 2014 it also published its financial results for the first time and opened a bank in Luxembourg.

The group describes itself as entirely family-owned and family-led across seven generations, with about 700 staff. French Wikipedia gives 696 employees at the end of 2025 and lists three managing partners, two of them from the seventh generation of the Mirabaud family. In 2022 Mirabaud joined the Henokiens, an association of companies still owned by their founders’ descendants after two centuries.

Its businesses are wealth management for individuals, families and entrepreneurs, asset management through Mirabaud Asset Management, launched in 2012, and corporate advisory work through Mirabaud Advisors. French Wikipedia says the group ended its brokerage and trading business in 2024. Mirabaud opened offices in São Paulo and Montevideo in its bicentenary year, 2019, and in Lausanne in 2026. In the other direction, Nour Private Wealth announced on 3 November 2026 that it had completed its acquisition of Mirabaud Canada, the group’s Canadian wealth-management business, on 30 October 2026.

Regulators have also acted. On 17 September 2024 FINMA, the Swiss financial-market supervisor, announced that enforcement proceedings opened in June 2021 and concluded in June 2023 had found that Mirabaud & Cie SA breached its anti-money-laundering obligations and seriously violated financial market law. FINMA confiscated profits, barred the bank from taking new clients with increased money-laundering risks until compliance was restored and ordered further measures; it said the ruling had been legally binding since August 2023. On 7 May 2025, Keystone-SDA reported in blue News, the Geneva public prosecutor closed the money-laundering charge against the bank and fined it for lack of due diligence in financial transactions, in a negotiated procedure.

How private banks present themselves.

Private banks and wealth managers sell trust, continuity and discretion rather than a product on a shelf, and their identities tend to say so quietly. Many lead with a founder’s surname or a family name set as a restrained serif wordmark, sometimes paired with a crest, a heraldic animal or a founding year. Pictet, for example, says its lion comes from a seventeenth-century family coat of arms and has carried the year 1805 beneath it since 1974.

Colour usually follows the same register. Deep green, navy, burgundy and dark brown are common choices across the sector, often set against cream, stone or white, with a muted gold or brass as an accent. The effect is closer to a bound annual report or a club library than to a retail bank, and bright, saturated colours are rare.

Imagery leans on history and people. Websites and printed material often show portraits of founders and partners, historic premises and archive photographs, alongside heritage timelines that count the generations or the years since the founding. Partnerships and family-controlled houses in particular use their age and ownership structure as part of the message, explaining how decisions are taken and who is responsible.

The content itself is advisory. Typical pages cover wealth planning and succession, family offices, investment views and house research, market commentary, sustainable investing and philanthropy services, often with long-form articles and reports rather than short promotional copy. For designers, the sector is a study in restraint: generous white space, careful typography and a narrow palette do much of the work that louder brands leave to slogans.

A bank that collects contemporary art.

Mirabaud’s image leans on contemporary art. The company says it has worked with museums, artists, fairs and events for several decades, and French Wikipedia describes a collection of hundreds of works, shown in the group’s offices and online, including pieces by Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Nan Goldin and Sol LeWitt. For its bicentenary the group gave the City of Geneva Moon, a polished-steel sphere by the Swiss artist Not Vital, installed on the Plaine de Plainpalais in 2019, French Wikipedia says. It has a long partnership with MAMCO, Geneva’s museum of modern and contemporary art, and since 2022 one with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, renewed in 2025.

Sport has played a part too: French Wikipedia says Mirabaud was the main sponsor of the Bol d’Or, the annual regatta on Lake Geneva, from 2005 to 2024. The website frames the rest of the identity in the language of continuity — more than 200 years, seven generations, and a stated purpose of serving clients while ensuring that finance contributes to “a better and fairer society for all.” Its research and market commentary appear under the heading The View, with series and author pages, and the site warns the public about websites falsely claiming a link to the group.

For a design guide, Mirabaud shows how a private bank can build its image around partnership, a long timeline and a collection of contemporary art. Compare Lombard Odier and Pictet, two other Geneva private banks. For this guide we use a deep green, ivory and a muted gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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