Opening a Portuguese Bank account is relatively easy, but there are some things to keep in mind:
- Get your NIF. To open a bank account, you first need to have been issued your NIF.
- Choose a bank. Having a bank account is required for the D7 Visa application but not all banks allow you to open account without a Visa. We chose Novobanco because they do not have this requirement and because there is a branch close to where we will be living.
- Get Vetted. Even with your NIF and $$ in hand, you still might not be able to just walk into a branch and open an account. The agency we used, Relocate to Portugal, vetted us to the bank. Then, when we arrived in Portugal, we only needed to sign papers.
- Get a Portuguese Phone #. To set up a bank account, we were told that access codes only could be sent to Portuguese phone numbers. We didn’t get one when we were in Portugal and immediately regretted it. Fortunately, we received access codes to our U.S. number without incident.
- Fund the account. After setting up the bank account, you can fund it using a service such as Wise to transfer money.
After we signed our bank account papers we received paperwork that contained our bank account information. That’s all we got — no ATM cards, no online account. We decided to ask for our ATM cards, and they quickly initiated the process to have them sent to our U.S. address. We had no idea how long it would take to arrive, someone told us it could take months. Oh no!
We needed to fund our account, and at this point we could send money but couldn’t see it land in our account. The only way to verify that the money got there was to email our banker. Oh no!
We soon received mail containing our PIN and a matrix card. Oh good! A step toward independence.
But we were confused by this matrix card. We emailed the banker in Portugal and waited. It was August, he was on holiday with the rest of Portugal. So, we decided to figure it out ourselves, and we successfully logged into our account!
A week or so later, our ATM cards arrived. Phew! We heard that we might not need the physical cards, because many places scan a QR code that is generated in the banking app. That would be cool!
