Portugal's Export Credit Agency Left Private Hands on Tuesday, and the Bank Taking It Over Says Only 0.2 Percent of Exports Are Covered

On Tuesday 1 September, the Banco Português de Fomento (Portuguese Development Bank) began selling export credit insurance and issuing State guarantees on international deals, under a new brand called Fomento Trade. It is the point at which Portugal's export credit agency stops being a private insurance company and becomes part of the state-owned development bank, a change first ordered by ministerial despacho in June 2022 and postponed twice since.

The company that held the job before is COSEC, Companhia de Seguro de Créditos, which has managed the system of state-guaranteed export credit insurance on the Portuguese state's behalf since 1969. COSEC now trades under the Allianz Trade brand. Fifty-seven years of that arrangement ended this week.

What Fomento Trade actually sells

The offer splits at the two-year mark, which is the standard dividing line in export credit practice between short-term commercial cover and the medium and long-term business that only state agencies tend to write.

• Credit terms up to two years. Short-term export credit insurance, covering up to 90 percent of the insured value against commercial risk, political risk and catastrophic risk. This is the mass-market product, and Fomento Trade does not sell it directly: it is distributed through the private credit insurers already operating in Portugal.
• Credit terms over two years. Export credit guarantees, bonds on international contracts, guarantees on Portuguese investment abroad, and guarantees on financing extended to the foreign buyer. These are managed directly by Fomento Trade.

The bank says the whole set operates in line with Portugal's commitments under the OECD Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits and with European Union rules, which is the constraint that stops export credit agencies from turning into open-ended subsidy machines.

Gonçalo Regalado, the bank's chief executive, who last year set out a 30 billion euro funding plan for 2026 to 2028, framed the launch around confidence rather than money: Portuguese companies, he said, have "talento, inovação, ambição e capacidade para competir em qualquer mercado do mundo", talent, innovation, ambition and the capacity to compete in any market in the world, and what they need is "confiança e segurança para dar o próximo passo", the confidence and security to take the next step.

The number that made the case

The argument for taking the mandate back was never really about who owned the insurer. It was about how little the instrument was being used.

Speaking to ECO in October 2025, Regalado put it in one line of arithmetic. Portuguese exports, he said, are worth 95 billion euros, and only 230 million of that carries export credit insurance with a state guarantee. That is 0.2 percent. He called it "incompreensível", incomprehensible, that Portugal had handed its export credit agency to a foreign insurer, and described the position as a double fragility: "Somos o único país da Europa que só tem uma empresa, uma agência de crédito à exportação... Só temos uma, é privada e é de estrangeiros. E isto não é suportável." We are the only country in Europe with a single export credit agency; we have only one, it is private, and it is foreign-owned, and that is not sustainable.

Two notes on that figure. The 95 billion euros is the chief executive's own basis and appears to include services; ECO's separate reporting puts Portuguese goods exports for 2025 at roughly 80 billion euros. Either way the ratio stays inside a rounding error of nothing, in an export economy where 3 percent of companies generate 46 percent of the exports.

Manuel Castro Almeida, the Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion, made the same point at the parliamentary hearing on the 2026 State Budget in October last year, when the stock of state-guaranteed export credit insurance stood at around 230 million euros, "bastante menos de 0,5%" of exports. He called the amounts "modestíssimos", extremely modest, and said the regime would be changed and the business moved to the development bank.

What COSEC was actually running

The portfolio handed over is small but not trivial. COSEC's own reporting put the state-guaranteed book it managed at 723.9 million euros on 31 December 2024, with 194.7 million euros of responsibilities assumed during that year. It issued 921 policies in 2024 and had 879 in force at year end, written for about 240 exporting companies across 72 export markets. Food products and medicines accounted for close to half the state-guaranteed business. Nothing in that list corresponds to the sectors that dominate the export headlines: footwear alone shipped 813 million euros in the first half of this year.

Alongside that sits a commercial credit insurance market that never depended on the state guarantee at all. Four insurers write credit cover in Portugal: Allianz Trade, Atradius Crédito y Caución, Coface, and CESCE, which is itself the Spanish state's export credit agency operating directly in Portugal. Premium volume in Portugal reached 82.7 million euros in 2025, up only 23.8 percent since 2019, and covered around 38 billion euros of domestic and export sales at the end of that year. Allianz Trade holds roughly half the market by premium, at 42.5 million euros in 2025.

Regalado's stated plan is to widen distribution beyond those four, taking the number of insurers selling credit cover in Portugal to somewhere between half a dozen and ten.

Who carries the risk

Moving the agency does not move the guarantee. The state guarantee behind these policies is still the state's, and the machinery around it is unchanged.

The regime rests on Decreto-Lei n.º 183/88 of 24 May and Decreto-Lei n.º 295/2001 of 21 November, with Lei n.º 4/2006 of 21 February covering concessional aid credit. The Entidade do Tesouro e Finanças (Treasury and Finance Entity) proposes the principles, issues the guarantees, and represents the Ministry of Finance in the relevant European Union and OECD working groups. It also runs environmental and social impact screening on supported operations, with particular attention to projects above 10 million euros. The state does not grant these guarantees without limit: the ceiling is set each year in the State Budget law rather than by permanent statute.

What changes is who assesses the risk, writes the policy and chases the business, and the government's bet is that a development bank with a mandate to grow exports will do more of the last of those than an insurer with no particular reason to.

Four years, and two missed dates

The decision is older than the launch. On 21 June 2022, a despacho signed by António Costa Silva, then Minister of Economy, and Fernando Medina, then Minister of Finance, was published in Diário da República. It instructed the Banco Português de Fomento to complete, by 31 December 2022, the work of assessing the best model for an export credit agency that would either sit inside the bank or be wholly owned by it.

The despacho was explicit that the point was to keep the expertise rather than rebuild it. The model, it said, should allow the bank to absorb "na maior extensão possível" the know-how then held at COSEC on managing the state-guaranteed insurance system, including by keeping or transferring the human and material resources tied to those functions. It also acknowledged the importance of continuing the activity in order to close a market failure, and not to cut Portuguese companies off from an instrument that most European countries provide.

The handover was expected in January 2026, then set for 1 July 2026, and finally happened on 1 September. The bank spent the intervening period expanding on other fronts, including a cross-border memorandum with Spain's ICO signed in Madrid in June. Allianz Trade continues in Portugal as a private credit insurer, alongside the other three, without the state mandate.

What it means if you export

For a company already insured, nothing lapses: the point of the transfer, per the 2022 despacho, was continuity of cover. For a company that has never looked at the instrument, which on the numbers above is almost every Portuguese exporter, the practical position from this week is:

• Short-term cover on invoices with up to two years of credit is still bought through a credit insurer, not from the development bank directly, and now carries up to 90 percent cover with the state standing behind it.
• Anything longer, including guarantees on a buyer's financing or on performance under an international contract, goes to Fomento Trade at the bank.
• Credit insurance never covers the whole invoice. Leaving a slice of the risk with the seller is deliberate, and the market norm sits between 85 and 95 percent of the net unpaid invoice.
• Late payment inside Portugal is a separate problem with its own remedies, and one the state is not blameless on: eight percent of municipalities settle supplier invoices past the 60-day statutory limit.
• Premiums move with the destination country's risk rating, the sector and the credit term. Brokers in the Portuguese market currently quote a range running from about 0.09 percent to 1.5 percent of the invoiced value.

The bank has not published targets for how much of the 0.2 percent it expects to move, or by when. That is the number worth watching, and the first honest test of it will not arrive until Fomento Trade has a full year behind it.