Best bank 2025: Santander
By pairing record profitability with sector-leading digital adoption, standout customer satisfaction, forward-looking sustainable finance and a deepening community role, Santander Portugal set a new benchmark for Portuguese banking in 2024.
Santander Portugal sealed 2024 with a record €990 million in recurrent net profit, 11% higher than the previous year, while preserving the country’s leanest cost-to-income ratio at 25.5% and a common equity tier-1 buffer of 16%. Asset quality remained strong, with non-performing exposures at just 1.6%, reinforcing the bank’s reputation for disciplined risk management.
The group’s ‘best digital bank with branches’ ambition is reshaping customer behaviour. It added 78,000 active and 84,000 digital users, taking its totals to 1.9 million and 1.3 million respectively. Around 99% of its 328 outlets now offer 24/7 self-service kiosks and a fourth co-working-style Work Café was opened in Porto. Mobile engagement surged, with 770,000 clients using the Santander app as their sole channel. The app’s net promoter score of 69 tops the sector, supported by 99.9% channel uptime and a slew of usability upgrades, from instant IBAN-sharing to biometric onboarding and child-friendly account views.
in terms of its balance sheet, Santander reinforced its dominance in domestic lending. Mortgages grew 5.5% to €23.3 billion, buoyed by a mixed rate offer that captured a quarter of new market flow, while consumer credit expanded 7.8%. Product innovation extended beyond loans: the bank launched CUF Santander health insurance with CUF and Aegon and refreshed its partnerships – with fuel discounts from Repsol now complemented by electricity, gas and Lidl grocery rebates.
Corporate and small and medium-sized enterprise banking also gathered pace. Loans to companies reached €22.8 billion, nearly 60% of which serve SMEs, and new SME credit rose 31.7% year on year. Santander had channelled €2 billion of sustainable finance by year-end and secured fresh firepower through InvestEU facilities and a €250 million European Investment Fund sustainability guarantee. Energy transition tie-ups with EDP and the European Investment Bank are funding solar installations and building efficiency upgrades, while the bank leads urban renewal lending under Portugal’s IFRRU 2020 scheme.
Santander’s social footprint grew alongside financial metrics. Backed by a €7 million annual budget, the Santander Portugal Foundation reached 153,000 beneficiaries through partnerships with the Lego Foundation, TUMO Lisboa, Code.org and Aga Khan Schools 2030. A further 105,000 people advanced their skills through the Santander Open Academy and 1,700 students received grants, underscoring the bank’s integration of profitability, digital ambition and community commitment in its Portuguese franchise.
Best investment bank 2025: Caixa – Banco de Investimento
Caixa – Banco de Investimento (CaixaBI) stands out for its impressive investment banking business in 2024, underpinned by a strong commitment to sustainability and cross-border advisory.
Among several key developments last year, one of the most important was the bank’s continued leadership in Portugal’s debt capital markets. During the period under review, the bank ranked as the number one bookrunner for Portuguese issuers, both in volume and number of deals – leading three times more transactions than its closest competitor.
ESG issuance was another area in which the bank excelled in 2024, bringing five new ESG retail bonds to market totalling €350 million, including debut transactions for CUF, Vista Alegre and SIC. The bank also arranged Portugal’s first corporate social bond, enabling Mendes Gonçalves to finance an employee housing programme.
The bank’s expertise extends to cross-border advisory, particularly in Portuguese-speaking Africa. In Mozambique, the bank advised a local financial institution on structuring an IPO, while in Angola, it continued to support the government’s privatisation programme, building on its successful advisory role in the IPO of Banco Caixa Geral Angola in 2022.
As part of its investment in innovation, the bank arranged €500 million in electricity receivables transactions and supported major infrastructure projects, including Portugal’s high-speed rail.
The launch of a syndicated loans desk in 2024 further expanded the bank’s capabilities, enabling it to originate and participate in new credit opportunities across Europe.
Best investment bank for M&A 2025: Santander
Santander has cemented its position as the leading M&A adviser in Portugal, maintaining top rankings by both deal volume and value since 2020, according to MergerMarket and TTR. In 2024, the bank maintained this momentum with a series of high-profile mandates that showed its dominance across multiple sectors and deal sizes.
A standout transaction was its role in advising KKR on the €1.16 billion public tender offer for Greenvolt, the largest equity capital markets and energy deal in Portugal in 2024. Santander acted as both financial adviser and financial intermediary in a landmark transaction that highlighted its strength in the energy and renewables sector. The bank also led in the food retail real estate space, acting as sole financial adviser on the sale of a 49% stake in Les Mousquetaires’ Portuguese property company – comprising 268 retail stores with a gross asset value of approximately €500 million – one of the largest such transactions in Europe.
Santander also demonstrated strategic advisory capabilities beyond Portugal as well, including advising EDP Renováveis on the €300 million sale of 306 megawatts of solar and wind assets in Poland to Orlen. In the Iberian chemicals sector, the bank acted as sole financial adviser to Bondalti on its public tender offer for Ercros, a transformative cross-border merger aimed at creating a European chemical powerhouse.
Its activity in the mid-market space remained equally robust. Santander advised on the sale of Portuguese dairy company Sequeira & Sequeira to Lactalis, supported Saur and Aquapor’s joint acquisition of CTGA and Enviman, and guided Blueotter in acquiring fragrance maker Castelbel. Notably, the bank also advised Constructel Visabeira on its US expansion through the acquisition of Sargent Electric, showcasing its capacity to support clients’ strategic cross-border growth.
Best digital bank 2025: Banco BPI
Over the past year the bank has moved decisively from digitising services to reinventing entire customer journeys. Its online and mobile platforms now serve more than one million active users, 44,000 more than a year ago, and the surge in activity has pushed it to second place nationwide for individual engagement across digital channels. That momentum has been underpinned by Portugal’s first selfie-based remote onboarding process, which allows residents and non-residents alike to open an account in minutes without stepping into a branch, keeping acquisition open around the clock and easing pressure on the physical network.
With a similar ambition to collapse friction for small enterprises, the bank and telecom operator NOS have launched Pulsoo, the country’s first app that fuses open-banking aggregation, payment initiation and real-time connectivity to the tax authority. Small and medium-sized enterprises gain a single window for cash-flow monitoring, regulatory filings and curated knowledge articles, giving the bank a way to embed itself in the daily running of a business rather than at the margins of its finances.
Property finance is receiving the same end-to-end treatment. QUATRU, unveiled this year, is the only Portuguese platform that lets a buyer progress from artificial intelligence-driven affordability checks and credit simulations to virtual tours, visit bookings, a fully digital mortgage and even a post-purchase home-services marketplace – all without leaving the app. By weaving these specialised ecosystems into its core mobile experience, the bank is steadily turning transactional relationships into multi-faceted digital partnerships.
Best bank for SMEs 2025: Millennium bcp
Millennium bcp has made major strides in its small and medium-sized enterprise offering, positioning itself at the forefront of digital innovation and tailored financial support.
Central to its recent achievements is the launch of the iziBizi financial management tool, a solution that has earned accolades across the industry, including awards from the PayTech Awards, Celent and the Qorus SME Banking Awards. Designed to integrate SME bank accounts, automate cash flow oversight and deliver real-time financial insights, iziBizi has already been adopted by over 2,000 Portuguese SMEs.
Complementing this is the bank’s next-generation Corporate Homebanking platform, which consolidates a range of digital enhancements into a seamless user experience. The platform introduces Portugal’s first artificial intelligence-powered cash flow forecasting tool, equipping SMEs with proactive alerts on liquidity risks. This is paired with instant digital credit solutions that allow SMEs to secure funding directly through the platform, eliminating delays and capturing time-sensitive opportunities.
Additionally, the bank has simplified bulk payments through intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, enabled multi-bank account integration via open banking, and introduced real-time transfer capabilities – all of which significantly reduce the administrative burden on small businesses.
Millennium bcp has also led in financial inclusion, launching Portugal’s first micro-leasing product under the Progress Microfinance initiative in collaboration with the European Investment Fund. Targeting entrepreneurs who often face difficulty accessing traditional credit, this solution marks a significant improvement in SME access to capital.
Sustainability is now also embedded in the bank’s SME strategy. Through its Green, Social and Sustainability Bond framework, Millennium bcp has created new avenues to finance environmentally and socially impactful projects, particularly those led by SMEs.
Enhanced relationship management and onboarding further support these innovations. SMEs can now open accounts entirely online in a matter of minutes, while interactive features and real-time feedback tools improve engagement, oversight and service customization.
Best bank for large corporates 2025: Banco BPI
BPI has accelerated its push into the large-corporate arena by doubling down on digital capability and sustainability. Heavy investment in new platforms mirrors the rapid tech adoption of its multinational client base, equipping relationship teams with data-rich tools and flexible channels that facilitate the shift to low-carbon, circular business models.
The strategy is translating into scale. Corporate sustainable assets and liabilities almost doubled in 2024 to €1.55 billion, and the bank arranged an additional €1.55 billion in green and social financing – the clearest signal yet that environmental criteria now sit at the heart of its risk-return thinking. With a 12.4% share of all credit extended to Portuguese non-financial companies, BPI’s corporate and institutional loan book expanded 3.7% to €12.4 billion, and growth was registered across every sub-segment from infrastructure to export-oriented manufacturers, underscoring the breadth of its franchise.
Operational discipline has kept pace with business growth. AENOR renewed the bank’s service quality certification with 100% compliance on every audited parameter, validating a personalised attention model that combines rigorous service standards with real-time digital touchpoints. The underlying quality management system now hard-codes technological efficiency, environmental responsibility and a strict ethical code, reinforcing board-level confidence among large corporates.
Best bank for corporate responsibility 2025: Santander
Santander Portugal has turned its foundation into a strategic lever for social impact, now channelling around €7 million a year into community programmes. In 2024 the bank sharpened its focus on experimental learning, becoming the first Portuguese institution to partner with the Lego Foundation. Ten schools and one municipality received €5,000 awards to pilot ‘learning through play’, positioning the bank at the forefront of educational innovation.
Santander has also doubled down on digital inclusion. A renewed alliance with Code.org is widening access to coding in primary classrooms, while backing for TUMO Lisboa, only the second free creative-technology centre in the country, is opening STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics) pathways for thousands of teenagers.
These initiatives feed into a broader upskilling and reskilling push: the Santander Open Academy trained 105,000 Portuguese citizens last year, the largest single investment in lifelong learning by any corporate in the country.
The bank has also begun to address the supply side of education reform. Through a new €300,000 agreement with the Aga Khan Foundation’s global Schools2030 programme, it will fund applied research and train 1,500 teachers and school leaders by 2027. Direct financial inclusion continues in parallel, with more than €1.2 million in grants distributed to 1,700 university students in 2024.
Entrepreneurship remains a third pillar of the foundation: 1,173 young innovators and startups passed through Santander-backed accelerators and high-profile events such as Web Summit and the Estoril Conferences. Altogether the foundation touched 153,000 people and businesses last year, and public polling shows that nearly half of Portuguese adults now associate Santander with educational support, a reputational dividend that underscores the scale of its recent corporate responsibility initiatives.
Best investment bank for financing 2025: Millennium bcp
Millennium Investment Banking (Mib), the investment banking division of Millennium bcp, has demonstrated exceptional performance in the past year. For the year 2024, Mib reported revenues of €34.2 million, primarily achieved through fee-based activity without capital allocation. This approach underscores its operational efficiency and client-centric strategy.
In terms of market activity, Mib has a diversified portfolio across corporate finance, structured finance, project finance and capital markets. The bank’s leadership in the environmental, social and governance (ESG) area and sustainable finance is evident from its issuance of ESG bonds and sustainability-linked finance totalling €1.5 billion. This includes its role as a global coordinator and lead manager in ESG debt issuance worth around €650 million and its involvement as lead manager in green commercial paper programmes amounting to roughly €450 million.
Mib has also been pivotal in medium to long-term financing for renewable energy projects, contributing about €420 million. In corporate finance, Mib provided crucial financial advice and participated in key mergers and acquisitions, including a notable fairness opinion during the public tender process initiated by KKR Fund for Greenvolt.
In structured finance, Mib structured, negotiated and set up 12 financing operations internationally, worth a total of €1.9 billion. In 2024, Mib also managed about €3.2 billion under various commercial paper programmes, further showing its strong financial structuring capacity.
Mib continues to lead and innovate in the Portuguese market, particularly in fostering ESG principles and supporting climate transition projects, with an ambition to generate about €2 billion of climate transition credit in the strategic plan for 2025 to 2028.
Best bank for ESG 2025: Banco BPI
Banco BPI’s sustainability agenda gained critical mass over the past year as green lending volumes almost tripled to €1.9 billion, sharply lifting the proportion of sustainable credit in overall new production. The bank scaled this activity by matching its own‐book offerings – ranging from retail green mortgages to hydrogen, solar and circular-economy loans – with €300 million in European Investment Bank funding and a suite of thematic credit lines such as BPI/BEI and ESG-Empresas. The blended structure gives companies of every size access to concessional rates, signalling BPI’s intent to mainstream low-carbon finance rather than treat it as a niche segment.
Building capacity for the real economy has become a parallel priority. A new education-plus-finance programme developed with Nova SBE tackles the knowledge gaps that often prevent smaller businesses from investing in efficiency upgrades. By coupling tailored training with preferential financing, the initiative translates technical ambition into bankable projects and widens the funnel of viable green borrowers.
Internally, governance and social metrics have kept pace. The bank met its gender diversity target ahead of schedule and has embedded environmental, social and governance performance indicators in its latest three-year strategic plan, ensuring that sustainability considerations now shape capital allocation and executive incentives. Meanwhile, BPI mobilised 2,100 employee volunteers in 2024, reaching more than 17,000 beneficiaries through structured community programmes that extend its impact beyond balance sheet activities. Together, these moves position the institution as both financier and facilitator of Portugal’s low-carbon, inclusive transition.
