Unicaja Brand Guidelines: The Málaga Bank Born From Five Andalusian Savings Banks

A 1991 merger in Andalusia.

Unicaja began as a savings bank formed on 18 March 1991, when five Andalusian savings banks merged, according to Spanish Wikipedia’s article on Fundación Unicaja. The oldest was the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Cádiz, dated to 1884; the others were savings banks in Almería (1900), Antequera (1904) and Ronda (1909), and the provincial savings bank of Málaga (1949). The provincial savings bank of Jaén, dated to 1981, joined on 1 January 2010. The long legal name of the merged institution — the Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Ronda, Cádiz, Almería, Málaga, Antequera y Jaén — still lists those towns, while the public used the short name, Unicaja.

The bank behind today’s brand is younger. On 1 December 2011 the savings bank signed the deed creating Unicaja Banco, a wholly owned bank that took over its financial business, Spanish and English Wikipedia say; the savings bank itself kept its social programmes and its monte de piedad, the traditional pawn-lending service. On 31 October 2014 its general assembly approved turning it into a banking foundation, now Fundación Unicaja, which remains the largest shareholder: Wikipedia gives its stake as 31.22% at the end of 2025.

The bank keeps its registered office in Málaga. It floated on the Madrid stock exchange on 30 June 2017 and is a member of the IBEX 35 index, English Wikipedia says.

From Castile and León to Asturias.

Unicaja grew by absorbing other former savings banks. The first was Banco CEISS, the bank of Caja España-Duero in Castile and León, later renamed EspañaDuero. The two sides had agreed a merger in 2011; after a public offer, Unicaja Banco completed its purchase of CEISS on 28 March 2014 and made it a subsidiary. CEISS had received public support in 2013, which Unicaja Banco repaid in August 2017, English Wikipedia says. The absorption deed was registered on 21 September 2018, and from December 2018 the EspañaDuero branches in Castile and León were rebranded, with Unicaja Banco as the main name and EspañaDuero as a secondary one; elsewhere in Spain the old name was simply replaced.

The second was Liberbank, whose shareholders included the foundations of the Cajastur, Caja de Extremadura and Caja Cantabria savings banks. A first attempt at a merger, announced in December 2018, was dropped in May 2019. Talks resumed in October 2020; the boards approved a merger by absorption on 29 December 2020, shareholders approved it on 31 March 2021, and the Spanish government approved it on 16 July 2021, after the competition authority, the CNMC. The deed was registered in Málaga on 30 July 2021, and the technical integration of Liberbank was completed on 23 May 2022, according to Wikipedia. The registered office stayed in Málaga, with operational centres there, in Oviedo and in Madrid.

One subsidiary has since left the group. In July 2024 the Andorran bank MoraBanc agreed to buy Banco Europeo de Finanzas from Unicaja; the purchase was completed on 28 July 2025, Spanish Wikipedia says.

Savings-bank heritage, modern banks.

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.

Back to the savings-bank name.

The name has changed with the mergers. After 2011 the bank traded as Unicaja Banco, and in July 2021 it said it would put that brand on Liberbank’s branches. On 8 February 2024 it announced a new identity that dropped “Banco” and returned to plain Unicaja, the name the old savings bank had used, with what Spanish Wikipedia describes as a more modern image. English Wikipedia says the new identity has been rolled out across branches since early 2024 and is expected to replace both the Unicaja Banco and the Liberbank brands. The palette in this guide is our own interpretation.

The name also reaches well beyond banking. Spanish Wikipedia says Fundación Unicaja owns the Unicaja basketball club in Málaga and sponsors teams including Málaga CF and the volleyball club CV Almería; English Wikipedia attributes ownership of the basketball club to the bank. The foundation carries on the social and cultural work inherited from the savings bank.

Recent design-relevant work is digital. On 8 November 2026 the trade site Territorio Fintech reported that Unicaja had won three prizes in The Digital Banker’s Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2026: one for its digital transformation programme, one for NICA, its virtual assistant, and one for Huchas Digitales, a tool for setting and tracking savings goals. The report said NICA can carry out more than 100 banking operations through natural-language conversation, and that Huchas Digitales had more than 40,000 users; it placed the awards within the bank’s 2025–2027 strategic plan, which aims to combine digital channels with personal service, and noted an earlier 2026 digital-transformation award to Unicaja from the magazine Global Finance.

Online, the retail bank uses the unicajabanco.es domain, to which unicaja.es redirects, while investor and corporate information sits on unicajabanco.com.

For a design guide, Unicaja shows how a bank can return to a regional savings-bank name after a decade of mergers. Compare Ibercaja and Kutxabank, two other Spanish banks in this series. For this guide we use a deep green, an olive and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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