Banco de Portugal Sets Up a National Payment-Resilience Plan With Energy, Telecoms and Retail After the 28 April 2025 Apagão — Relatório dos Sistemas de Pagamentos 2025 Books a 36% Terminal Drop and 80% Restaurant Value Shock on the Day

Banco de Portugal released the Relatório dos Sistemas de Pagamentos 2025 on Thursday 21 May 2026, using the cover note to disclose that a Plano Nacional para a Resiliência dos Pagamentos is being negotiated with counterparts from energy, telecoms and retail through the Fórum para os Sistemas de Pagamento. The drafting mandate was approved at the Fórum's plenary on 20 November 2025, roughly seven months after the 28 April 2025 Iberian apagão took Portuguese card rails out at 11h33 and held them down for the rest of the afternoon. The supervisor frames the plan as an explicit answer to that day, writing that the blackout "emphasised the need for integrated, cooperative action to strengthen the security and reliability of payment systems and solutions in Portugal and to guarantee an effective response to incidents."

The Day-of-Apagão Tape, in BdP Numbers

The report's value-added is a clean breakdown of what the blackout did to Portuguese card and cash flows on 28 April 2025. The Bank measures both against the average of the two weeks before the event:

• POS terminal purchases inside Portugal: -36% in both volume and amount on the day.
• Restaurants: the worst-hit sub-sector — -60% in volume and -80% in value.
• Average ticket: held flat at €33 despite the intra-day drop in transaction count, suggesting the surviving transactions skewed slightly higher and not lower.
• ATM withdrawals on Portuguese territory: -34% in volume and -24% in value.
• Average withdrawal amount: climbed to €90 from a two-week pre-event average of €78, a +15% step in the per-pull figure.
• 13h00–14h00 window: the only intra-day band that registered an increase in ATM activity — BdP attributes the spike to machines still running on batteries or generators, drawing concentrated demand from customers who knew the rest of the network was dark.

What the Plano Nacional Is Trying to Lock Down

The mandate from the November 2025 Fórum plenary names a coordinated cross-sector exercise — not a banking-only one. The participating perimeter includes energy and telecoms operators (the upstream dependencies that decide whether a POS or ATM can talk to SIBS and the acquirer at all) and retail on the demand side (the merchant base whose registers, scanners and integrated POS go offline first when the grid drops). BdP describes the work as being conducted with "representative entities of the supply and demand of goods and services and entities belonging to crucial activity sectors," without yet publishing operator-by-operator commitments or a deadline for the finished plan. The implication for our readers — and for the Multibanco/MB Way rails that anchor everyday spending — is that the next iteration of resilience will be built around inter-operator drills, common incident-response playbooks and explicit fall-back modes when one upstream sector fails, rather than around incremental hardening inside SIBS alone. For background on how the underlying rails work today, see our MB Way and Multibanco practical guide.

Why It Matters

The 28 April 2025 outage is the only national-scale stress test the Portuguese payment system has actually run, and the BdP's own figures show how thin the cash-out option turned out to be: a third of usual ATM activity, with average withdrawals rising fast enough to suggest people were emptying what cash was left at functioning machines rather than topping up a normal need. The -80% restaurant value print is the cleanest single read on how quickly a card-dependent sector collapses when the rails go down, and it lands in a market where contactless and MB Way already eclipse cash for most under-€50 transactions. The Plano Nacional is BdP's first public commitment to treat payment-system continuity as cross-sector critical infrastructure rather than a banking-supervisory matter — and it sits alongside the supervisor's other recent macroprudential moves, including the 45% DSTI mortgage cap that lands before summer and Thursday's net-external-debt twenty-year low at 35.67% of GDP.

Source: Banco de Portugal, Relatório dos Sistemas de Pagamentos 2025, published 21 May 2026; reporting via Agência Lusa.