CMVM's Luís Laginha Tells the Regulator's 35th Anniversary Conference the Conta Poupança-Investimento Proposal Is in an Advanced Stage — Lisbon Capital-Markets Push Targets the Household-Deposit Tilt the 2024 ISFF Read Pinned at 74.6% of Financial Wealth

The president of the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários — Luís Laginha de Sousa — used the regulator's annual conference on Wednesday 27 May, staged for the CMVM's 35th anniversary under the theme 'Innovation in Capital Markets', to confirm that the long-trailed Conta Poupança-Investimento (CPI) proposal is now in 'a very advanced stage' of preparation with the Government and the Banco de Portugal.

The diagnostic Laginha used to anchor the case is the one the BdP's Inquérito à Situação Financeira das Famílias (ISFF) 2024 read off on Wednesday 28 May: of the financial wealth held by Portuguese households, 74.6% sleeps in deposits. The remaining 25.4% spreads thinly across mutual funds, shares, bonds and life-insurance products — a portfolio composition that, in the CMVM's framing, leaves Portuguese savers structurally exposed to inflation erosion and starves the domestic capital market of the long-duration liability base European peers rely on.

The proposal's contours are the part the regulator has been signalling for months. The CPI would be a tax-advantaged savings-and-investment wrapper, modelled on the British ISA and the Italian PIR — instruments that pair preferential personal income-tax treatment with mandatory minimum allocations into listed-equity and corporate-bond instruments, often with a national-issuer tilt. Laginha emphasised that 'there are no miraculous measures or silver bullets', but that a well-designed CPI 'can translate into one of the most important contributions' to addressing the Portuguese economy's structural under-investment in productive capital.

The political read on the file is two-track. The Finance Ministry has been receptive — every euro that migrates from a deposit account into a CPI is a euro that lowers the bank-funded retail-deposit base by a tick, but lowers the public funding cost over time by widening the domestic investor base for Treasury issuance and OT-class instruments. The labour-reform fight currently consuming the legislature is unlikely to derail the file, but it is likely to delay the parliamentary slot.

The technical architecture is where the proposal will earn or fail. Three questions sit at the centre. First, the fiscal cost: a deep tax-benefit structure widens uptake but consumes IRS revenue at the moment the European Commission has flagged Portugal's 2026 return to a 0.1% deficit. Second, the investment perimeter: too narrow a national-equity tilt risks ECB and European Commission scrutiny on capital-mobility grounds; too wide, and the domestic capital-market objective dilutes. Third, the annual-contribution cap: the ISA's £20,000 ceiling is the most-cited reference, but Portuguese household savings ratios are below the UK's, and a lower-than-£20,000-equivalent cap may be the calibration point.

The conference also placed two adjacent files on the table. Crypto-asset markets supervision under the EU's MiCA regulation has been transferred to the CMVM, and Laginha used the platform to set out a calibrated-supervision posture. And retail investor protection — the regulator's continuous risk-of-loss warning around social-media-driven trading exuberance — was repeated with a 'nerves of steel' frame Laginha first used in December.

For the average Portuguese saver, the CPI's arrival timeline remains the open question. If the proposal clears the Concertação Social adjacency, the technical drafting cycle and the Diário da República publication chain, the earliest plausible roll-out window is the 2027 Orçamento do Estado — the first window where a structural fiscal-incentive vehicle could be financed in a Government Budget. Until then, the deposits-dominated household balance sheet remains the structural baseline.