Accepting MB WAY in Portugal

MB WAY is Portugal’s mobile payment solution, operated by SIBS and built on the Multibanco network that Portuguese consumers already use for almost everything. For a merchant entering Portugal, MB WAY and Multibanco together are not an alternative to cards. They are the default.

Set-up

How to accept MB WAY as a merchant

You do not contract with MB WAY. Acceptance runs through SIBS, your Portuguese bank or a PSP that connects to the network. Payment is authorised in the consumer’s app, often by phone number or QR code, and confirmed in real time. Because it runs on domestic account-based rails, the economics differ fundamentally from card acceptance.

MB WAY, Multibanco and the reference payment habit

Portugal has a payment behaviour that catches foreign merchants out. Multibanco references, where the customer is given an entity and reference number and pays later through their bank or an ATM, remain widely used and are not instant. MB WAY is the real-time counterpart. Offering only one of the two, or treating a reference payment as though it settles immediately, produces reconciliation problems and abandoned orders that look like conversion failures but are process failures.

Parity

What you pay for instant is a service price, because the rail is not allowed to cost more

Instant used to be a premium and it is now a legal baseline, which changes what a quote for it can reasonably contain.

Portugal is in the euro area. Under Regulation (EU) 2024/886, payment service providers there had to be able to receive instant euro credit transfers from 9 January 2025 and send them from 9 October 2025. The regulation also settles the price question directly: any charges levied by a payment service provider on payers and payees in respect of sending and receiving instant credit transfers shall not be higher than the charges levied by that provider in respect of sending and receiving other credit transfers of corresponding type. Instant is not permitted to be the expensive option.

MB WAY is a service layer on top of that rail: an app, a directory that resolves a phone number to an account, an authorisation step and a confirmation back to your checkout. That layer is worth paying for. The rail underneath it is not allowed to carry a premium for being fast. So when you compare an MB WAY quote against a Multibanco reference quote, the honest question is what the difference buys you in service, because it is not buying you speed on the transfer itself. Whoever quotes you both should be able to answer that in one sentence.

EuroPA

EuroPA and the February 2026 MoU

On 2 February 2026 Bancomat, Bizum, SIBS-MB WAY, Vipps MobilePay and EPI Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build a central interoperability hub, with the ambition of seamless cross-border payments across Europe by 2027. The published sequence is cross-border person-to-person payments during 2026, followed by e-commerce and point-of-sale payments in 2027. Existing solutions keep their brands, features and user experience, with a new badge displayed alongside them so consumers can recognise wider acceptance. On 16 April 2026 a proof of concept confirmed cross-border QR-based in-store payments between participating solutions. For merchants the consequence is an acceptance footprint that widens without a new integration.

Which payment provider supports MB WAY for merchants in Portugal?

easypay, ifthenpay, HiPay and Sipay all document MB WAY, among others, usually alongside Multibanco. The useful questions are what you pay per MB WAY transaction against your effective card rate, whether reference payments and instant payments are priced and reported separately, and how your provider handles the timing difference between the two.

Default

Which of the two Portuguese options you put first is worth a number

Most Portuguese checkouts offer references and MB WAY as two equal choices in whatever order the integration happened to produce. That ordering is a commercial decision that nobody made, and it moves two things at once.

Numbers. Take 3 million euros of Portuguese revenue at an average order value of 60 euros, so 50,000 orders, currently splitting 60 per cent references and 40 per cent MB WAY. Suppose references run at 0.6 per cent and MB WAY at 0.9. On today’s split that is 10,800 plus 10,800, so 21,600 euros. Move fifteen points of volume from references to MB WAY by presenting MB WAY first and 450,000 euros crosses at 0.3 points more expensive, which costs 1,350 euros. On the fee line alone, moving to the instant rail is the wrong answer.

Now the other half. If 15 per cent of references go unpaid and MB WAY effectively does not, those 450,000 euros of moved volume convert roughly 67,500 euros of orders that used to expire. That is fifty times the extra fee. This is the whole argument in one comparison: the fee difference between two methods is knowable to two decimal places and usually trivial, while the completion difference is larger by an order of magnitude and almost never measured. Measure the second one before you optimise the first.

Reviewing what MB WAY costs you

Domestic Portuguese rails are frequently priced outside the main PSP negotiation, which is exactly where unexamined cost accumulates. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

Relevant markets: Portugal