“BNP Paribas views Portugal as a strategic pillar of growth in centres of excellence”

GTS. Growth, technology, sustainability. BNP Paribas has technology at the heart of the acronym that expresses its strategic plan, and much of this technology is made and managed in Portugal. “Technology is very present, it’s right in the middle”, says Diogo Malato Moura, in an interview with the “À Prova de Futuro” podcast. “And when we see that, and what has grown in Portugal with the centres of excellence, it’s basically about bringing together the people who are gaining this knowledge, it’s easier then to adopt technology that has to be adopted more and more quickly because, as we know, technology itself is evolving at a speed that didn’t exist before.”

The manager has been with BNP Paribas for 21 years, more than half of the four decades that the French group celebrated in Portugal in 2025, the year he was appointed head of corporate and investment banking for the branch, a position he holds alongside that of head of global markets front-office Portugal, which he has held since 2017. He is therefore the ideal person to explain to ECO’s podcast dedicated to business and technology (and sponsored by MEO Empresas) Portugal’s role in the bank, especially in relation to the 11 operational and technological centres of excellence it has in the country.

“We have 9,000 people in Portugal, we recruit a lot of people every year, and we still haven’t found a limit to our need to recruit qualified profiles.” The presence in the Eurozone, the ability to learn languages and, above all, the talent coming from universities are the factors that convince the French group to bet on Portugal as a “strategic pillar” for the growth of centres of excellence, whose functions include risk management, compliance, finance, back office and IT.

Among the two roles he holds at the bank, Malato Moura leads almost 800 people, half of whom work in the country’s largest trading room and the rest in corporate and investment banking. “There are areas, for example, where we are market leaders in Portugal, in interest rate derivatives trading, in bond trading, and the ambition is also to use the platform here to grow even more in Portugal”, he stresses, giving as an example the potential for trading in a “very popular” area, which is commodities and raw materials.

BNP Paribas has been in Portugal since 1985 and has grown steadily. What services and scale does it have today?

We celebrated exactly 40 years in Portugal last year. And we are very well established in Portugal. We have many, many financial services locally. We have my area, banking for large companies and large institutional investors; financial institutions; factoring for financing. Leasing, such as the rental of large tractors for large companies; slightly smaller real estate; Cetelem, which is consumer credit.

Cars, etc.?

Exactly. Arval for car fleet management, for companies too, once again. The bank is obviously more geared towards small, medium and large companies and institutions. This consumer credit part is for individuals, but also for companies. Some more innovative offers, such as Floa, which is also specialised ‘buy now, pay later’ credit. Nickel, which is a digital bank. It entered Portugal in 2022 with a very interesting offer, whereby the distribution points are pastry shops and other outlets throughout the country, and it even received an award for social inclusion in France. Because traditional banks are no longer enough nowadays, there are no longer any branches, and people can carry out basic banking operations.

It is a point of interaction between the bank and the population, through an intermediary, could it be a small shop?

Exactly. And so, there are 10 local businesses in which we are always among the top 3, market leaders, top 5, for most of what I just said. Not all, but most of what I just said. We have a strong presence. Fund management company, where we sell BNP Paribas funds here in Portugal. Insurance company, even a wide range of European services.

It is a French bank that sees Portugal as an interesting and appealing market. Last year, we saw another Portuguese bank, Novobanco, being bought, so France looks favourably on Portugal in this financial area.

Yes. Firstly, Portugal currently has very, very good indicators. And then, traditionally, there is a relationship… These banks, both BNP Paribas and others, are present here through this type of company, this type of larger business. It ends up being natural for some types of banks that do not have such a large international expansion. In our case, in fact, it has been growing. I could give you dates, but 40 years ago it was the investment banking side. There are many dates. In 2022 it was Nickel. It is a follow-up to what is also necessary, which we see as being of interest to us, obviously, but also to the Portuguese economy.

In all this, there are several centres of expertise, 11 in total. What is the role of development, service and technology application? How does this help the group? How does Portugal help the group globally?

The centre of expertise is very interesting. BNP Paribas has grown significantly in Europe and worldwide, and the creation of centres of expertise or excellence ultimately helps to standardise and create best practices in areas that were previously handled separately in 12 or 13 countries, but are now handled in one place here. And so, not only does it help to improve the processes as they were, but also, having everything centralised, and when I talk about those 11, I can give interesting examples, of risk management, for example, of managing everything related to compliance, compliance for Europe, the financial part too, back office, operations.

Does Portugal do this for the whole group, and is everything done in Portugal?

Not only in Portugal. A large part is in Portugal, and in Portugal it is mainly done for Europe. Back office, operations, IT too, and all this centralisation allows us to be very agile, and now, referring to newer technologies as well, to be very agile because if we have 100% of a process here in Portugal, if there is a new technology that is developed, a new process and all that, it is easier to implement than if it were spread across several teams. This greatly helps the adoption of new technology.

Everything is concentrated.

Exactly. And, as we know, there is more and more technology. The BNP Paribas group has had three letters in its strategic plan for five years: G, T and S. G for growth, T for technology, and S for sustainability. So technology is already very present. It’s right at the centre. And when we see that, and what has grown in Portugal, the centres of excellence, it’s basically about bringing together the people who are gaining this knowledge, it’s easier then to adopt technology that has to be adopted more and more quickly, because as we know, technology itself is evolving at a speed that didn’t exist before.

In banking, and for these 11 centres of excellence, what is the scale here? Why did a French bank choose Portugal for all these activities? Are we talking about training, talent quality, prices, salaries, geography?

We currently have more than 9,000 people in Portugal working in the domestic market and in these markets that sometimes serve both the domestic market and Europe at the same time. The creation of the first centre of excellence dates back to when we were looking for a place to back up operations from another country so that they could run in parallel, in case these problems arose.

Redundancy.

Redundancy, in case of extreme events such as those we are seeing, for example, in Paris. And it was something that went so well that the bank decided to replicate it in other areas, not as redundancy, but as an attempt at centralisation. It is a plan that the bank has because this area, for example, investment banking, has doubled in size within the group in terms of revenue over the last 10 years. And so, for this, it needed to grow in various ways. So this attempt at a centre of excellence comes from there.

Secondly, the very good performance of the people we recruited at that time for this redundancy centre. Languages, as you know, Portugal has a great appetite for languages. Not only English, which is the most important, but also French. It’s important.

In universities, in fact, Portugal has made a leap that no other country has made. We currently have four universities in the Financial Times rankings. But in the field of engineering, the academic aspect is very important. We have 9,000 people, we recruit a lot of people every year and we have not yet reached a limit on the need to recruit qualified profiles. Therefore, this number of qualified young talents with great potential coming out of the Portuguese market was also a very important asset for what the bank was.

Then, our presence in Europe, within the Eurozone, was also important.

Stability?

As you know, in the financial market, political stability and exchange rates, which are also important when setting up a large operation, are also important. The bank is denominated, so to speak, in euros, although it has external activities. That was also important. All these characteristics ultimately led the bank to launch here, but it also launched other centres of expertise in other parts of Europe, and Portugal naturally ended up developing. In fact, as we can see, it is not only BNP Paribas that has this kind of presence, even with research and development centres. I would say that talent is perhaps the most important part of all this. There were other centres of excellence that grew, but they did not grow as much as Portugal because of this human factor.

What is the ambition? What is the bank’s strategic plan? And does that involve Portugal growing to how many thousands of people? Are there plans to open more centres since it is going so well?

There are plans to hire more people. I can’t give you a specific number, but we are open to it and have plans for it. I also can’t tell you that a new centre of excellence is coming. What we are trying to do is strengthen what we have.

With more features?

With more features, with more processes that didn’t go through here before. This area you’re talking about, the front office, so to speak, also has plans for growth, both in terms of numbers and in terms of what is done, from Portugal to the rest of Europe. And the bank sees Portugal as a strategic pillar of growth in this area of centres of excellence.

You have been with BNP Paribas for 21 years, more than half the time the bank has been here, and last year you were appointed Head of Corporate Investment Banking Portugal. What does that position involve? By the way, how is it going?

The position has three components. The first, which we talked about a little bit here, involves more than 400 people in the trading room, working for Europe as a centre. In trading, as you know, things are very centralised, so from Portugal, Paris, London, to Europe, structuring products, selling products, so that’s the first component, which I still supervise.

So, there are 400 people selling the bank’s financial products to customers wherever they are?

Exactly, including Portugal. They sell, structure, do macroeconomic analysis, even quantitative analysis, and then we distribute it to our customers so they can form their own opinion.

So-called research.

Research, exactly. And then they talk to customers from here about that same research. So, risk optimisation, capital optimisation, everything that happens in a trading room. Some areas are already here, other areas will be here later. That’s the goal. The second component… has to do with a relatively similar centre for corporate banking, where we do, for example, credit analysis for most of Europe, from Portugal.

Similar in terms of scale?

Similar in terms of size, a little close to 400 people as well.

Do you provide all services for corporations and companies?

Exactly. We have a financial sustainability centre where we do business for the whole of Europe. You’ve heard of sustainable finance and green bonds, of course. We have a large research and analysis team, and we try to characterise clients in relation to ESG. They are very advanced, if not already. The energy transition is very important to us. Credit analysis, interaction with clients also from Portugal, mergers and acquisitions, some data analysis. A centre here that, once again, works for Europe and within Europe for Portugal too, and with an increasingly growing weight in Portugal as well. And the third area is precisely the local market, with me now dedicating a large part of my work to growing it. As I said, we have been in the top 10 for many years, growing the number of deals we do here, helping clients to finance in the capital markets, issuing sustainable bonds…

Is M&A also with you?

Exactly, the M&A part. All of that, and then the more corporate banking part of large banks, which is treasury management, helping banks…

Finance, basically.

Exactly. This is the area that has been here for 40 years, and this area… Yes, three years ago we were number one in the Portuguese market, we have always been among the top five and the top three, and it is an area in which we want to continue to grow, because we really want to keep up with the big Portuguese companies, both in terms of their exports and here in the development they have had and that we want them to have.

I have been following the markets for some time and have seen the growth of this trading room, which is now the largest in the country. 400 people. What are the next steps? How do you see the trading room in two years’ time? Will it have 500 people, 600 people? What else will you be doing?

There are areas, for example, where we are market leaders in Portugal, in interest rate derivatives trading and bond trading. The ambition is also to use the platform here to grow even more in Portugal. Then there are other types of activities that we don’t yet have in Portugal and that we can develop. I can give you an example. We obviously offer commodity trading and sales services, so we’re talking about…

Very much in vogue.

Very much in vogue. But we don’t have anyone locally who deals with raw materials. This could be another area for growth.

In terms of analysis, in terms of product?

In terms of selling this specific product and analysis, we don’t do that. These are areas where we can grow.

Do you see this market growing? We are talking about very large variations in the prices of gold and silver. Do you think there is more interest because of volatility as well?

Yes, and for BNP Paribas it is strategic to now have a third trading room centre in Europe, so the idea is to strengthen this third hub even further. In terms of numbers, I’m not going to promise the spectacular growth we’ve seen in recent years. There is a greater acquisition of skills, so that the things we do in Portugal are of increasing added value. And the second part, as I was saying earlier, when you have so many people concentrated in one place, the adoption of technology is also easier. In the part I was talking to you about analysis, the use of big data to improve economic forecasting models and the whole process. In terms of execution, it is also much easier to use.

How do you manage technology? Technology has been used in the markets for decades, more recently high-frequency trading and algorithms, but now with a focus on AI, machine learning, big data, blockchain, smart contracts, cloud, we have an endless list. What is your focus?

The bank, as it had this very strong technology pillar, is looking at all technologies, some of which are being adopted quickly, while others are still being studied for implementation. Risk management is so important in a bank. To give a few examples, there are two very interesting aspects to machine learning. We already offer a proliferation of platforms where customers can use self-service for slightly more complex products. Machine learning allows us to identify trends in customer dissatisfaction and trends in products that may be needed. In the area of document reading, for example, where in the past the analyst had to spend hours looking at the documentation to produce their analysis, now they suddenly only have to do the analysis. Artificial intelligence, in this analysis itself, for example, I finished a paper today that I want to send to a customer, the paper is written in English. Perhaps in the past, customers in Italy or elsewhere had to wait several days for the translation. Nowadays, we have people who will look at the final result, but the use of artificial intelligence for this much smarter translation is used.

The cloud part, in fact, for accelerated computing, for data storage, with some caution. Yes, within banks, the adoption of technology has to be done with some caution and the cloud has to be, for us at least, a completely closed cloud, that is, we are not talking about a cloud shared by the whole world. But then, internally, it allows us to share information much more quickly. In terms of ledger or blockchain, these are still small experiments and not yet widespread, but let’s imagine that I am trading a large block of bonds or a large block of shares. Normally, what happens in this case is that you have to check that there is money in the account of the customer who wants to buy, and the process can sometimes take one, two, or three days. Being able to do this, and it is already being tested and has been tested, with tokenisation, i.e. creating this both in terms of money and the asset itself, makes it practically immediate. And this greatly eliminates the risk of waiting a day or two, of errors, of monitoring these errors. This is already being applied, but it is not yet universal. We have done a lot of testing. In Europe, we are pioneers, along with several other banks, in this area, and it has worked well. The whole ecosystem needs to move forward.

What is your interaction with fintechs? How do you view fintechs, both here and in the rest of the world? Have you acquired any? Do you have partnerships? Or do you observe and draw inspiration from them?

We are always looking at the fintech market. We have specific departments, both in the financial markets area and across the whole group. Traditionally, we start with a partnership, then we may buy a stake and end up acquiring it or not. Nickel, which I mentioned, and Floa were two fintechs that were acquired by the bank. And so we are always looking because, obviously, what is created by fintechs often fits in very well with a bank’s processes or complements it with a new service that did not exist and ends up being quicker to acquire than to create, or complements a process that was created from scratch by the fintech and then obviously adapts very well. We always have a portfolio of dozens of fintechs that we work with, and many more are analysed. A little while ago, we were talking about artificial intelligence, and we have partnerships with some that were fintechs, but are no longer so.

You mentioned risk earlier, and all of this involves risk, all technology, such as fintechs, including cybersecurity or overdependence on technology. How do you protect a trading room from these things?

What I said a moment ago is very important. A bank is an institution that has been managing risk for a long time. Market risk, financial risk, fraud risk, data risk. And so, there is another risk that has also been around for a long time, namely cybersecurity. And it is clearly one of the bank’s biggest investments each year, cybersecurity. I mentioned the cloud to you, and the choice of partner and type of cloud we have is also very important, because our customers’ data is the most important thing. There is a great appetite for crime, so I would say that this is something that cannot fail within BNP, and therefore a large part of our investments are concentrated there. When it comes to overuse or what is beginning to be overuse, the human element comes into play in a big way. Even in those examples I gave you earlier about interaction with customers, there are always people behind it. Ultimately, the technology process is only used to aggregate data, and then the analysis is done. Even with the advent of artificial intelligence, there always have to be people behind it.

Isn’t there a downsizing of the activity, or rather, of the teams? Is there, eventually, a transformation of the teams?

Exactly, because the number of customers we can reach is also much greater. The level of products we can make more safely is much higher. The time we used to spend dealing with operational risk is now spent dealing with customer interaction. So, basically, there may be a transformation of what some people used to do to do something else. I have been with the group for 20 years and for many years I have been talking to my teams, explaining that the introduction of technology should not be something that frightens people, although I admit that there is this apprehension, because it only makes me more interested in the person’s own activity. Because technology, ultimately, is here to serve us and, however intelligent it may be, it always needs a human touch. And so I would say that it is more from the perspective of where we can grow, what rituals we can eliminate, than, in fact, a replacement.

With the importance of the human factor, and we have already talked here about talent in Portugal, how is technology affecting your recruitment, training and retention in a very competitive environment?

For the BNP Paribas group, but especially for BNP Paribas in Portugal, attracting talent is crucial. We have started to partner with almost all universities in this country. The most traditional partnership is with the Master’s in Finance, but there are others in Engineering. We have a centre of excellence in IT here, so that aspect is also used. And in that regard, not much has changed, i.e. we have a value proposition for those who join us, and banking today is not only about finance, it is also about technology, so those who like technology, perhaps today we are able to attract more people from the technology field than we could previously. And then, with this sustainability aspect, which has been one of the group’s main mottos, as GTS said, this is also something that really appeals to our young people. So, in terms of attraction, we also have this very important component. In terms of when a person is within the group, there are several types, depending on the position they hold, there are several types of training. For young people, there is a more customised path or not at a certain level in the area. It can be technical financial skills or something else. For people who will manage others or who already manage others, there are specific courses and certificates, also in partnership with major universities in Portugal, to help train our leaders. For people who have been in the profession for more than 15 years, we have a programme called Build to Shift, precisely to be able to…

… Guide.

Guide, give new skills to these people. For employees as a whole… There is a programme that is a little more generic, but which gives anyone who wants it, even if they don’t need it today, the skills to deal with exactly this type of new technology. So that they have the tools they need for the day they need them. And so that, on the day they have to adapt to a new technology, they already know what it’s about. We’re not demanding that everyone know how to use a prompt or write code, but that they know what it is and then, if one day they have to adopt it, they’ll be much better prepared. We also have something else that’s interesting: in Portugal, for every three new jobs we recruit for, one is internal mobility. This is a high retention rate and allows us to have exactly this type of skill, and this type of training makes it easier for people to change and then go abroad as well.

Are you an international group? Can you send people abroad and take advantage of the talent here to go abroad? And, on the other hand, attract people from abroad?

We have both. Portugal is seen as a great source of talent because we have been doing interesting things, and I would say that there are about a hundred or so people a year who go to places like New York, Paris or London. And we obviously have people from outside, either because they have very specific skills or a lot of experience that we can’t acquire here, or even because we already have a lot of people interested, as you can see in universities too, a lot of people interested in just coming to benefit from the quality of life in Portugal. And we have people coming from all over the world. We have 86 nationalities working at BNP in Portugal. 80% are Portuguese, but the other 20% are divided among 86 nationalities. So it really is a magnet for people because of the quality of life and the bank’s reputation.