Bank Millennium's Polish Quarter Lifts BCP Earnings Pulse — Q1 2026 Net Profit Up 68% to €71.2M as Swiss-Franc Mortgage Provisioning Drops 61% and Business Lending Grows 27%
Bank Millennium's Q1 2026 net profit hit €71.2M, up 68% year-on-year. Swiss-franc mortgage provisioning dropped 61% and corporate lending grew 27%. Polish subsidiary de-risks BCP's group Q1 print expected early May.
Banco Comercial Português, listed on Euronext Lisbon as BCP and the largest private bank in Portugal by assets, opened the Polish chapter of its Q1 2026 earnings season on Tuesday, 28 April. Bank Millennium S.A., the Warsaw-listed institution in which BCP holds 50.1% of the share capital, reported a consolidated net profit of 301 million Polish zlotys for the first three months of 2026 — equivalent to €71.2 million. That marks an increase of 68% year-on-year from the PLN 179 million recorded in Q1 2025.
The headline number is a clean confirmation of the trend BCP investors have been pricing in: the Polish franchise is moving past the Swiss-franc mortgage litigation overhang that has weighed on Bank Millennium's books for most of the past five years.
The Q1 Print, Line by Line
- Net profit: PLN 301M / €71.2M (+68% YoY)
- Swiss-franc mortgage costs: PLN 212M pre-tax (–61% YoY)
- Net commissions: +12% YoY
- Operating costs: +12% YoY
- Loan portfolio: +5% YoY, with the corporate book up 27%
Bank Millennium said the contraction in CHF-mortgage provisions reflects the natural attrition of the legacy book combined with the running cost of the dedicated settlement programme. A €212 million pre-tax provisioning quarter would have been catastrophic two years ago; in the Q1 2026 P&L, it was simply absorbed.
Why This Matters for the Lisbon Listing
Bank Millennium does not, on its own, drive the BCP share price — but it removes a frequent quarterly downside surprise. Sell-side note Jefferies has put BCP's group Q1 2026 net profit at a record €293 million, which would extend the run that produced full-year 2025 net profit of just over €1 billion (+12.4%). The Polish subsidiary's clean print de-risks that estimate. BCP files its own consolidated Q1 accounts in early May.
Macro context cuts both ways. The euro has appreciated against the zloty in Q1, which compresses the translation of Polish profits into euros — yet the year-on-year growth still reads as +68% in euros precisely because the underlying PLN profit nearly doubled. The expansion of the corporate loan book (+27%) is meanwhile happening alongside a credit cycle in Poland that is still benefiting from the Polish central bank's restrictive stance and from EU-cohesion-fund deployment.
What This Means for Expats
- BCP-account holders: The improving group results reduce the probability of capital-raising pressure on the parent bank, supportive for retail-facing pricing on Portuguese accounts and term deposits.
- Mortgage borrowers with BCP: A profitable bank is a competitive bank — Lisbon is currently in a market-share fight on residential credit spreads, and BCP's earnings strength keeps it in that fight.
- PSI-20 investors: BCP is one of the heaviest-weighted financials on the Lisbon index. A solid Q1 helps the broader index narrative through the May earnings window — alongside Galp's +41% Q1.
- Dividend outlook: BCP's dividend-payout ratio has crept above 50% over the past two cycles. A clean Polish quarter helps protect the AGM payout assumption that retail shareholders are pencilling in for next year's distribution.
The full BCP Q1 group statement lands in the first week of May. If the Bank Millennium read-across holds, the Lisbon parent will print earnings with the Polish line item helping rather than weighing — for the first time in a long while.
