About BPI

Image of an orange with the description of its meaning.

The orange and the orange blossom

The orange and the orange blossom symbolise hospitality, dedication, and sense of service, evoking, in an unexpected connection, the history of the Portuguese Discoveries.

Orange flower from Banco BPI with orange outline.

Our personality

The Personality of an Institution is reinforced through its own attributes, which attain consistency and credibility in the relationship established every day with Customers and the Community. BPI lays special value to two of these attributes: Experience and Harmony.

Experience is the word that reflects Banco BPI's values.

Experience

Experience is the reflection of the training of our teams and the significant professional heritage gathered throughout the history of each of the institutions that gave rise to the Bank. This is reflected in the scale of the size of its commercial presence, the consistency of its financial indicators, the security of its growth and a proven capacity for achievement and leadership.

Harmony is the word that reflects Banco BPI's values.

Harmony

We associate Harmony with Experience, which expresses our permanent ambition to serve our Customers and the Community with the highest standards of ethics and quality. It is a future-oriented purpose, always open-ended, determined by the constant desire for improvement that will enable us to do better. It is our most challenging goal and, ultimately, the one that motivates all the others.

Banco BPI logo.

Our brand

The essential attributes of BPI - Experience and Harmony - feature in the colours, typography, and symbol of our brand.

The brand is therefore more than a simple image: it is a declaration of principles and a commitment to the Customer, our main reason for operating.

The orange and the Portuguese

The Portuguese journey around the world cannot be forgotten. We are left with evocative names, signs of a past lived with the intensity of great quests. It’s the case of the name of the orange that to this day, along the Mediterranean basin, it is still confused with Portugal: in Piedmont it’s portugaletto, in Kurdistan it’s portughal, in Albania portokale, and in Greece portugales.

Why did a plant that was already known change its name? Nowadays it seems certain that the sweet orange tree arrived a long time ago from the far end of China to the Mediterranean, by the hand of Muslim traders. More than the plant itself - or simply a new species of it - it is possible that in the second quarter of the 17th century the Portuguese brought directly from Macau a more refined technique for its treatment, intensifying the sweetness of the orange. Coeval memories say that the first tree of this sweetest orange tree was acclimatised by D. Francisco Mascarenhas, governor of Macau, in his property Quinta do Grilo, in eastern Lisbon.

The new orange tree quickly became coveted, and soon spread to the four corners of the world, gradually replacing the other traditional species.

José Sarmento de Matos Historian