Very portuguse experience,zero responsibility zero emphaty full of incompetency.Just bear till acquiring passport and park your money good al usa or uk.I expericed exact situation.I would invest more and buy/construct buildings .However, after experiencing 
, i just wait patiently and movee !
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Have found Millennium BCP to be ok.
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This was awful. I heard a lot people got their Novo Banco accounts restricted, meaning they could transfer their money out, but could not receive any inward transfers. In extreme cases, people got their online banking access locked.
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Hey Benjamin, I am in the middle of such a review right now. They are asking me all kinds of unreasonable questions. My lawyer has also requested to get involved but I dont want to do that / not sure if it will help.
Was there anyone at Novobanco that helped you out that I could connect to?
If you’re wanting to keep the account, there doesn’t seem a way around it. If you’re wanting to close the account and avoid the unreasonable requests, the branch manager is the main person who ‘did’ anything after escalating it through all the channels of complaints publicly and internally all the way up to the CEO.
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Thanks for your response!
Unfortunately I am not getting a response from the Branch Manager (or who I think is the Branch Manager), nor from the Customer Support email. Would you have the contact details of the Branch manager of the Castilho branch - I am assuming this is where most GV/Expat accounts are opened.
What you went through sounds like a painful process.
Unfortunately mine was with the Boa Vista branch in Porto. I hope you’re able to sort it as it was extremely infuriating and honestly has made me change my decision of pursuing creating a life there.
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Come on. If you think that banks have become intolerable in Portugal only, you are in for a not so pleasant surprise.
Last week one of my ‘home’ accounts was blocked and I was intrusively interrogated for about 30 minutes only to tell me at the end that my account will remain blocked until they complete further ‘investigation’. When I demanded the reason they told me it was for my own good as they did it to protect me from becoming a victim 
Yeah, sure. Give me your money, so I will protect you from using them.
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I’m dealing with this same issue with Novo Banco. No notice that my account was frozen. I only found out when a transfer in was rejected. Went to the branch and was advised to email documents. It’s now been three weeks since I provided documents and I sent a message Monday with no response.
Based on this thread I’m not going to fight it. If I can open a new account at another bank faster than they can reactivate my account there is a problem with this bank and it is not worth staying.
Where are people going that will handle Americans? Millennium?
I never got responses despite multiple escalations and emails. I even ended up in tears in the Boavista branch. I ended up opening an account with Santander who have proven better in every way.
Don’t go to Millennium please 
The Kim’s family are also always for the North Korean people’s good.
Bison Bank has been great for this American. I like having a designated client manager who responds within hours, even when I would swear it’s midnight in PT. The online banking works well too. Apparently they’re expensive, but it seems like it’s worth a little extra for the peace of mind. My manager even patiently allows me to practice Portuguese in our emails, though I always follow up with English to be safe! 
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I think it is very branch-dependent: my wife, a U.S. Citizen, had an excellent experience with Millenium BCP in Amoreiras.
I agree with that sentiment 100%.
I’ve been with Millennium for day-to-day banking and Bison for share custody for over 5 years now and they are like night and day.
I could probably get by just with Bison now that they have a virtual bank card. Their customer service is genuinely good, as others have pointed out.
I only keep Millennium open on advice from my lawyer, who said it might be worth maintaining just in case I need easy access to the paper trail from when I paid into my GV fund. Once I get citizenship and cash out, I’ll shut it down. And I’ll enjoy doing so.
I won’t go into a long rant about their failings again, only to say Millennium is AIMA in bank form.
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Where is your branch, if I may ask?
Boavista, Porto
Just to share the latest ‘brilliance’ of Millennium..
I have had a problem with them for a couple of years where the incoming transfers into my account would be delayed for indiscriminate amount of time every time. It could take two weeks or two months or whatever for the transfer to appear in my own account.
Ok, I thought it was due to them not liking international transfers (SEPA by the way, which must take 1 day to process, but see above..).
So I have opened a local account at another PT bank, and made a local transfer from there - same story. It went into some long journey and a few weeks later finally got into my MBCP account. That was an ‘ordinary’ transfer, so I then decided to try an ‘instant’ one, and it worked! So for a few months I thought I had it solved, but no, not with MBCP 
The latest thing they’ve done is that now they are rejecting the instant transfers! And we are talking here about 15-20 euro transfers for a cup of coffee and a pastel de nata, not millions from winning a lottery type of transfers 
Tommy, just want to share my transfer experience to my account at MBCP. Since 1.5 years, I have been making monthly transfer of 1k using Revolut . Although my account with Revolut is not in a SEPA country, I think it uses SEPA routing and the money always reachs my account at MBCP less than 24 hrs without a fee charged by MBCP.
However, when i made a SEPA transfer from my IBRK account to my MBCP account, it took 3 working days and MBCP charged me 20EUR for a 100EUR transfer.
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Well, I don’t have much experience with that branch, but the one in Amoreiras, Lisbon seems to work fine for us so far. Sorry to hear about all the bad experiences others had.