Leading investor Natixis reinforces its commitment to Porto and expands its presence in Portugal

Natixis has established Porto as one of the BPCE Group’s most important centres of expertise at an international level, transforming a project initially envisaged for around 600 employees into an operation that currently employs over 3.300 people and continues to play a strategic role in the organisation’s global growth.

The CEO of Natixis in Portugal, Etienne Huret, explains that the decision to expand the company’s presence to Lisbon stems directly from the success achieved in Porto. Since the centre of expertise was established in 2017, the company has found in the city an ecosystem of highly qualified talent, capable of exceeding all initial expectations.

The original aim was to establish a centre with around 600 employees. However, by 2020, Natixis already had over 700 staff, which led the group to significantly accelerate its growth plans. Currently, the operation in Porto employs around 3.300 professionals and is expected to stabilise at around 3.500 employees, making it one of the city’s largest hubs for skilled employment.

According to Etienne Huret, the success of the operation is down to the quality of Portuguese talent. The CEO highlights the high level of technical training, intellectual capacity, commitment, motivation and language skills of the professionals - factors that have enabled the company to evolve from a centre focused exclusively on technology into a multidisciplinary structure which today carries out activities in IT, middle office, back office, risk management, compliance, finance and functions increasingly closely linked to the bank’s front office.

It was precisely this capacity for execution and value creation that led the BPCE Group to strengthen its commitment to Portugal. The group considered several cities in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and even Morocco. However, it concluded that it made more sense to continue investing in Portugal, capitalising on the existing infrastructure and the potential of the country’s talent pool. The choice fell on Lisbon, not as a replacement for Porto, but as a natural extension of the operation established in Porto.

In the CEO’s words, the talent developed in Porto served as the best proof of Natixis’s ability to generate value within the BPCE Group. This experience was decisive in justifying a new investment in Portugal and enabled Lisbon to emerge as a complement to the Porto operation, benefiting from the experience accumulated over recent years.

The two centres will share a common mission. Lisbon will support the growth of Natixis’s various business areas, particularly Corporate & Investment Banking, working in close coordination with Porto. Some areas of activity will remain exclusive to one of the locations, whilst many teams will be spread across the two cities, depending on business needs and the availability of talent.

Despite the opening of the new office in Lisbon, Porto will remain Natixis’s main centre of expertise in Portugal and the group’s largest operation in the country. By the end of 2028, the company expects to have around 4.000 employees in Portugal, with approximately 3.500 based in Porto and around 1.000 in Lisbon.

Another factor cited as crucial to Natixis’s success is its strong links with Portuguese universities. The company highlights the high quality of the country’s higher education and its ability to attract young talent through recruitment programmes, in-house academies and training pathways that accelerate the integration of recent graduates and foster the development of international careers.