Accepting Multibanco in Portugal

Multibanco is the Portuguese interbank network operated by SIBS and the backbone of almost every domestic payment habit. For a foreign merchant entering Portugal it is not optional, and it carries one characteristic that regularly breaks assumptions built elsewhere in Europe.

Timing

Reference payments settle later, and that changes everything downstream

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.

How to accept Multibanco as a merchant

Acceptance runs through SIBS, a Portuguese bank or a PSP connected to the network. Alongside references, MB WAY provides the real-time mobile counterpart. Offering both is normal and sensible, but they behave differently enough that your order management needs to distinguish between them explicitly rather than treating both as one Portuguese method.

Execution

The delay is the customer’s decision window, not the rail

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.

Pricing

What actually drives the cost

Multibanco is a domestic rail without card interchange, so it usually prices below card acceptance. The pricing sits with SIBS or your Portuguese bank rather than with your main PSP, which means it routinely falls outside the contract review that covers cards, and stays at whatever was agreed on the day you entered the market.

Which payment provider supports Multibanco for merchants in Portugal?

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.

Working capital

An open reference is stock you cannot sell and money you do not have

The fee on a Multibanco reference is the small number. The expensive part is what an unpaid reference does to two things that never appear on a payments invoice: your stock and your cash.

Numbers. Take 3 million euros of Portuguese revenue at an average order value of 60 euros, so 50,000 orders, and suppose 60 per cent arrive as references. If 15 per cent of those references are never paid, that is 4,500 orders a year that reserved stock and released it again, and if reserved stock cannot be sold to somebody else during a three-day window, you have taken units out of circulation 4,500 times for nothing. In a category where a size or a colour sells out, some of those reservations cost a real sale, not a hypothetical one.

Then the cash. Reference volume that has not yet been paid is revenue you have recognised as an order and cannot spend. At 1.8 million euros a year of reference volume with an average of three days outstanding, roughly 15,000 euros is permanently in transit. Neither number is large on its own. Both are permanent, both are invisible under a payments report that shows only completed transactions, and both shrink the moment the instant option is presented first rather than second.

Reviewing what this costs you

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