Accepting Multibanco in Portugal

The classic Multibanco flow gives the customer an entity number, a reference and an amount, which they then pay through their bank or at an ATM. The order is placed at checkout but the money arrives later, sometimes days later. Treating that as a completed payment breaks fulfilment logic, inventory reservation, reconciliation and refund handling in turn. A high abandonment figure on Portuguese orders is frequently not a conversion problem at all; it is unpaid references timing out.

It is worth being precise about where the days go, because the two halves of a reference payment have completely different characters and only one of them is yours to manage.

Once the customer actually pays the reference, European law bounds what happens next. Article 83(1) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 requires the payer’s payment service provider to ensure that, after the time of receipt as referred to in Article 78, the amount of the payment transaction will be credited to the payee’s payment service provider’s account by the end of the following business day. The transfer leg is a day, and it is a regulated day.

So when a Portuguese reference takes four days, roughly one of those is the payment system and three are the customer deciding. That distinction matters because the two halves respond to different interventions. The rail leg responds to nothing you can do. The decision leg responds to a reminder email at the right hour, a clear expiry date in the confirmation, and an instant alternative presented first at the checkout. If nobody in your business has separated the two in the data, every conversation about Portuguese abandonment is being had about the wrong half.

easypay and ifthenpay in Portugal, alongside Worldpay and Braintree, all document Multibanco, among others, usually with MB WAY. The useful questions are what a reference payment and an instant payment each cost, whether they are reported separately, what proportion of your references go unpaid, and how long your system waits before releasing reserved stock.

What you pay is set in your PSP contract, not by the scheme. 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