Banco BPIâs identity is marked by the financial and business culture of Banco Português de Investimento. The essential traits of this culture are management independence, organisational flexibility, team work, recognition of merit, the ability to anticipate, strict management of risks and prudent creation of value.
Earning a just return from the Bankâs business operations through the adoption of best management and service practices constitutes a fundamental goal of our activity. Protecting the interests of our Clients with dedication, loyalty and confidentiality, is one the core principles of the business ethics and code of conduct of the Bankâs Employees.
An institutionâs Personality asserts itself through its own attributes, which gain consistency and credibility in its daily interaction with the Clients and the community. In particular, BPI values two of these attributes: Experience and Harmony.
Experience
Experience is the reflection of the training undergone by our teams and the important professional capital accumulated throughout the history of each one of the institutions that gave rise to the Bank. It translates into the scope of our commercial presence, the soundness of our financial indicators, the security of our growth and our proven ability to achieve and lead.
Harmony
We wish to combine Experience with Harmony, which expresses the permanent ambition of serving our Clients and the Community with the highest standards of ethics and quality. This is an aspiration projected into the future, always open-ended, driven by the constant desire for improvement that will allow us to do better. This is our most challenging objective and that which ultimately justifies all the others.
The essential attributes of Banco BPI - Experience and Harmony - are present in the colours, lettering and symbol of our brand.
Our brand is therefore more than an image: it is a statement of principles and a commitment to the Client, the primary reason for our existence.
The orange and the orange blossom symbolize welcome, dedication and a sense of service, evoking, in an unexpected connection, the history of the Portuguese Discoveries.
The orange and the Portuguese people
The Portuguese travels around the world left their marks. They left names, signalling a past history lived with the intensity of great ventures. One of these is the orange which even today, all along the Mediterranean basin, borrows its name from Portugal: in Piemonte it is called portugaletto, in Kurdistan portughal, in Albania portokale, in Greece portugales.
What would have led a plant that was already known to change its name? As it is now generally accepted that the sweet orange tree had long ago been brought by Muslim merchants from distant China to the Mediterranean. More than the plant itself - or simply a new species of it - it is possible that in the second quarter of the seventeenth century the Portuguese brought directly from Macao a more sophisticated method to intensify the sweetness of the orange. It is written in ancient memories that the first sapling of this sweeter orange tree was acclimatised by Don Francisco Mascarenhas, governor of Macau, in his Quinta do Grilo, in the eastern part of Lisbon.
What is certain is that soon the new orange tree became widely coveted, spreading throughout the four corners of the world and little by little replacing the other traditional species.
José Sarmento de Matos
Historian
