Caja de ahorros

In Spain, a savings bank (Spanish: caja de ahorros or informally just caja, Catalan: caixa d'estalvis, Galician: caixa de aforros, informally 'caixa', Basque: aurrezki kutxa) is a financial institution that specializes in accepting savings deposits and granting loans. Spanish banks fall into two categories: Privately owned banks (bancos) and government owned banks (cajas—literally pay office, or pay desk). The original aim was to encourage thrift among the very poor, but they evolved to compete with and rival commercial banks.

Over time, most cajas colluded with regional political establishments to create a self-serving system of unscrupulous financing for regional governments provided by politically stuffed savings banks' boards which, in turn, thrived in what has been defined as "a culture of greed, cronyism and political meddling". This system was exposed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. As a result, out of the 45 cajas in existence at the start of the crisis in 2007, only two have survived in their initial form. The rest were absorbed by banks, dismantling in effect the cajas model in Spain.

Their trade association is the Spanish Confederation of Savings Banks (Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorro or CECA).

European countries that adopted the Scottish savings bank model early on were those in which traditional Protestant values of self-help and the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus were particularly influential. Such was not the case in Portugal and Spain where savings banks started rather late (1836 and 1839, respectively) and followed the French model (established in 1818).

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