Five years ago, if someone had told me Lisbon would be hosting Europe’s largest fintech meetings event I’d have been sceptical. Last month, Fintech Meetup chose Lisbon for its first European edition. Not Berlin. Not Paris. Lisbon.
The Fintech House, the vertical fintech hub downtown, has gone from 15 startups during the pandemic to over 110 companies across 10 floors.
Portugal Fintech’s SPRINT accelerator just graduated its latest batch of 11 fintechs.
Twelve Portuguese ecosystem builders made the Financial Times ranking of Europe’s leading startup hubs this year.
Companies like Feedzai, Remote, OutSystems, and Coverflex aren’t just Portuguese success stories anymore. They’re global companies that happen to have been built here.
But Cais Capital didn't get started in Portugal just because the ecosystem is trendy. Its because that's where our clients are.
Portuguese SMEs that trade internationally have been underserved for years. They’re paying too much on FX, getting poor visibility on their payments, and dealing with banks that treat them like an afterthought. The big fintech players in London are building for enterprise clients and institutional flows. Nobody was building for the Portuguese textile exporter, the Algarve property developer, the Porto manufacturer buying raw materials in dollars.
That’s the gap. And you don’t fill it from London. You fill it from here, speaking the language, understanding the tax system, knowing what a sala de mercados is, and being available to meet for a coffee in Leiria when a client needs to talk through a Treasury de-risking decision face to face.
There’s something else about building here that people underestimate. The talent. Portugal has been quietly producing excellent engineers, finance professionals, and operations people for years. The cost base is lower than Northern Europe but the quality of work isn’t. We’re in the same time zone as London. We fly to any European capital in under three hours. And frankly, the quality of life means we attract people who could work anywhere but choose to be here.
Is Portugal going to become the next London for fintech? No. And it doesn’t need to be. What Portugal is becoming is a place where focused, well-run companies can build for the Iberian and Southern European market with an infrastructure and talent pool that didn’t exist a decade ago.
We’re proof of that. Cais Capital is a proudly 100% local Portuguese company powered by iBanFirst’s institutional-grade platform, serving Portuguese businesses with the kind of FX service that used to require a London office and a team of 40. We do it from Cascais with better technology, lower overheads, and a relationship with every single client.
That’s not despite being in Portugal. It’s because of it.
