Banks slashed 3,700 jobs and closed 19% of branches in five years

Portugal’s banking sector has closed 801 branches and shed 3,700 jobs over the past five years in the biggest shake-up and restructuring in the sector’s history.

However, the process of slimming down and modernising the sector after the great banking crisis 10 years ago, with the sector shedding 41% of branches and cutting 18,000 jobs had been going on since 2013.

This process continued during and after the pandemic as the sector adopted new technology, particularly digitalisation and AI, across all operations.

Over the past decade, Portugal’s banking branch network went from 5,647 to just 3,327 at the end of last year, while the number of employees went from 77,706 in 2013 to 59,087 in 2023.

In the districts of Lisbon and Porto alone the number of agencies fell by almost a half in the space of a decade with the closure of 1,020 branches.

The district less affected by branch closures was Angra do Heroísmo on the island of Terceira, in the Azores which over a 10 year period only lost 13% of its branches, keeping 33 open, compared to the 38 it had in 2013.