Has anyone got a recommendation for a Portuguese bank? I have my residency card and have been dealing with Millennium but they are so bureaucratic I just can’t stand it. Lately I tried to open another account to use for separating some investment returns for clarity in accounting and it has taken two months and they still haven’t opened it. Just keep asking for more financial information on world income etc, Never mind I already have several accounts with them. I need a new bank. Hopefully smaller and more responsive
OK so they have always been a bit sclerotic in dealing with things but you’re right they have recently gotten worse. They just denied opening another account?? Hard to believe since I already have two accounts with them. What’s the difference?
Anyway looking for an alternative. How about investment banks like a Goldman Sachs or a local equivalent can they deal with GV private equity and other investments does anyone know?
I use Banco Invest. It is fairly good.
I haven’t found one of the international ‘investment banks’ that is considered local / Portuguese. In general these institutions don’t hold their funds in Portugal / subject to Bank of Portugal supervision, so not useful for GV purposes.
If you’re looking for a representative office, many are in Lisbon or have coverage from Madrid. Try Credit Suisse /UBS.
BPI Private is a good local bank offering international funds imo.
Keep in mind any funds held in a Portuguese institution may be subject to PT taxes, while funds offshore can be protected.
Second BPI.
I think most Portuguese banks just aren’t that sophisticated. It’s not a big enough market, there’s only about so much international interest in Portugal, and there certainly aren’t a ton of sophisticated wealthy players in the market to need advanced services. Certainly none of the global banks are going to bother, not that I’ve ever seen.
I’d look at the Spanish banks as your closest bet, say Santander. Maybe Bison, they’re small and specialized in wealth management. Or just don’t keep your money in Portugal at all.
For local retail banking, Activo.
Sure but I need the local bank to hold my investment funds for the GV. So might as well have my accounts with the same bank.
I hear what you are saying but while that might seem to be the best answer, it doesn’t seem to work out that way in practice. You can use Bison as your retail bank, if you don’t mind overpaying on fees and using clunky interfaces. And as a third-country-national, it might not be a bad idea to be multiple-banked just in case one of them decides to tie you up in paperwork and freeze your account or something.
I am happy with leaving my fund shares in bison then doing absolutely no other business there and using Activo for everything else. But YMMV.
OK, I see your point and it’s a good one. I guess I’ll use two banks. The fees are nominal here in Europe.
Anymore, it seems like you want to have a plethora of banks available to you, given the mysteries of KYC rules and government intervention and different service sets. My wife and I have 8 banks between all three of us with a panopoly of different accounts across three countries, multiple brokerages, and additional credit card providers, with a deliberate attempt to maintain decade-plus relationships. This isn’t entirely deliberate on our part, some of it is just accumulated detritus, and it does introduce inefficiencies in terms of cash management, but it does also provide defense-in-depth against getting un-banked, which while a tail risk, especially for me, in the modern world is quite, quite problematic if it occurs to you and against which there is little to no useful defense thanks to the idiocy of KYC and BSA rules and just plain how bankers are forced to think. This might be less of an issue elsewhere in the world, I don’t know.
Even in the micro it can be a pain in the ass. A friend and I had to roll across France and Germany in a van two years ago because our bikes broke, and that meant several stops for fuel, and I had to wield multiple cards to get one that would work in all of the different pumps. (You would think that a Portuguese debit card would work in all of them. It didn’t. Don’t ask me why. That said, I suspect gas pumps are an anomaly. Everything seems to work fine if you go in to the counter. It does however highlight how imperfect banking can be.)
That said I do have to, at some point, simplify. It has gotten out of hand. If I die now, my wife is going to spend forever trying to understand it all.