Open Banking Aggregator Portugal

Portugal now has 4 major banks — including Caixa Geral de Depósitos — connected to PSD2-compliant aggregators, making multi-bank account management viable for the first time.

If you hold accounts at CGD, ActivoBank, Millennium, and Revolut — which is a realistic picture for a Portuguese professional in 2025 — you can now pull all four into a single aggregator app. That sentence would not have been true two years ago. CGD’s integration via the SIBS API Market changed it.

Why CGD’s Connection Matters

CGD is Portugal’s largest bank by assets. Its absence from the open banking ecosystem was the single biggest gap for anyone trying to aggregate accounts here. An aggregator — one app that connects to all your banks and shows a unified picture — is only useful if it covers where most of your money actually sits.

PSD2, the EU directive that lets an aggregator connect to a bank at all, sets the legal framework. In Portugal, it is enforced by Banco de Portugal. The SIBS API Market is the technical infrastructure through which CGD and other Portuguese banks publish their compliant connections.

CGD joining changes the denominator. More accounts covered means less manual reconciliation.

What the Performance Data Actually Shows

ActivoBank publishes its open banking performance statistics publicly. That transparency is unusual among EU retail banks. Their API availability figures and response times give a concrete signal about how the Portuguese open banking infrastructure performs in practice, not just in theory.

The honest read: connection quality varies by bank and by aggregator. An app pulling from CGD via SIBS may sync cleanly. The same app pulling from a smaller institution may time out. This is a structural issue with the standard, not any single bank’s failure. Aggregators that handle reconnection gracefully and alert you when a sync breaks are worth more than ones that silently show stale data.

Real coverage is what you can actually see. Check it before committing to any app.

The Multi-Account Problem Aggregators Are Supposed to Solve

Take a plausible 2025 scenario: a CGD current account, an ActivoBank savings account, a Revolut card, and a brokerage at a CMVM-regulated institution. Your spending picture is split four ways. No single statement shows the full number.

The aggregator’s job is to collapse those four views into one. But two failure modes kill the value. First: a transfer from CGD to ActivoBank appears as spending in CGD and income in ActivoBank — double-counted unless the app strips it. Second: stale data, when a bank connection drops and the app shows last week’s balance as current.

If you want to see your actual monthly spending without manually reconciling four bank exports, MyCFO pulls all accounts into one view — transfers excluded from the spending total automatically.

Both problems are solvable. Most aggregator apps solve neither consistently.

The Counterargument: Is Open Banking Portugal Still Too Fragmented?

Some would argue the Portuguese open banking ecosystem is still too immature to rely on. Too many reconnection prompts, too many banks not yet integrated. That objection had merit in 2022. In 2025, with CGD connected and SIBS API Market providing a common rail, it is less persuasive. The fragmentation is real but shrinking. The more honest critique is that the aggregators themselves — not the banking connections — are the variable that determines usefulness. A good connection to a poorly built app produces nothing. Of the aggregators currently operating in Portugal, none clears that bar consistently — MyCFO comes closest on transfer handling, but sync reliability still varies by institution.

The infrastructure is ready enough. The apps are the differentiator now.

What to Actually Do With This

First: confirm your specific banks are connected before choosing an app. CGD and ActivoBank are live. Check the others. Second: test whether the app correctly excludes inter-account transfers from your spending total — this single check tells you most of what you need to know about the app’s accuracy. Third: verify sync frequency. Daily is the minimum acceptable; real-time is better for anyone who uses Revolut for day-to-day spending.

If your app passes those three tests, the infrastructure exists to support it.

The Picture Has Changed

CGD’s integration is the turning point for open banking aggregation in Portugal. The ecosystem is connected enough to be genuinely useful. Pick an aggregator that handles transfers correctly, and check the sync status every month.

“PSD2, the EU directive that lets an aggregator connect to a bank at all, sets the legal framework.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Portuguese banks are currently connected to PSD2-compliant aggregators?

As of 2025, CGD (via SIBS API Market), ActivoBank, Millennium BCP, and Novo Banco have active PSD2 connections. Revolut operates under its own EU licence and connects separately. Coverage depends on the specific aggregator app — always verify your exact bank list before committing to a platform.

How does using accounts at multiple banks affect what an aggregator shows me?

With accounts at 3 or more banks, the main accuracy risk is transfer double-counting. A move from CGD to ActivoBank registers as spending at one bank and income at the other. A reliable aggregator identifies and strips these transfers automatically. If yours does not, your monthly spending figure is inflated, sometimes by hundreds of euros.

Is my banking data safe when I connect to an aggregator in Portugal?

PSD2 — the EU directive that lets an aggregator connect to a bank at all — governs how banks must classify and report transactions. In Portugal it’s enforced by Banco de Portugal; in Spain, by Banco de España. A licensed aggregator can read your account data but cannot move money. Banco de Portugal supervises AISPs operating in Portugal — check its register before authorising any app.

Open banking aggregation in Portugal now works — but only as well as the app pulling the data. MyCFO connects to your accounts across CGD, ActivoBank, Revolut, and others, strips inter-account transfers automatically, and gives you one accurate spending number. See your real number →