Caixa Geral de Depósitos to invest €200 million in digital

State-owned bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos is to invest over €200 million over five years in digital transformation.

The plan means investing in technology but does not ignore the elderly who are used to transitional branch banking, neither will it involve redundancies and the closing down of branches.
“The first thing we thought about when going for digital is that it should cover all of our clients. We are not all ‘millennials’ (people born between 80s and 90s) who hardly ever put their foot through the door of a bank branch (doing everything online) and we have many elderly clients who are used to doing their banking in branch”, says Maria João Carioca, CGD director who heads the digitalisation process.
According to Maria João Carioca the investment in technology is so that the bank is “prepared for the future”, adjusting its services with €50 million on digital transformation and the remaining €150 million “in general modernisation”.
Despite, CGD having a restructuring plan underway, she said that the “restructuring plan is not and should not be just a plan to cut costs or sell off assets” adding that digitalisation will not cause the closure of more branches or the laying off of staff.