SIBS Walks Its Administrative Action Against Banco de Portugal Off the TACL Docket on Wednesday 13 May — Dona do Multibanco Drops the EU 751/2015 Payment-Processing-Separation Lawsuit Sixteen Months After Filing It at the Lisbon Administrative Court

SIBS — Forward Payment Solutions (FPS), the Portuguese-banking-system-owned operator of the Multibanco network and the MB Way mobile-payments product — has dropped the administrative action it filed against the Banco de Portugal at the Tribunal Administrativo do Círculo de Lisboa (TACL), the Lisbon administrative court. The action, originally filed by SIBS on 15 January 2025 contesting a specific BdP regulatory determinação on the separation between payment-systems and processing-systems under EU Regulation 751/2015, was withdrawn on the eve of the substantive procedural-and-merits phase. The withdrawal lands roughly sixteen months after the original filing, twelve-and-a-half months after the Banco de Portugal filed its formal contestação at the TACL on 29 April 2025, and twelve months after the BdP's own institutional signal of 8 May 2025 that it would proceed to its determinação without waiting for the court.

The Dispute — EU Regulation 751/2015 and the Separation Rail

The dispute centred on the interpretation of Regulamento (UE) 2015/751 do Parlamento Europeu e do Conselho, de 29 de abril de 2015, on interchange fees for card-based payment transactions — the EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR). The IFR fixes a multi-strand framework that covers: (a) interchange-fee caps on consumer-debit and consumer-credit card transactions (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit, with member-state-level discretion on the debit cap and Pan-European-card-scheme nuances); (b) business-rule transparency on the four-party-card-scheme economics; and, crucially for the SIBS dispute, (c) the separation of payment-card-scheme governance from the processing entity under IFR Artigo 7.º.

IFR Artigo 7.º requires that payment-card-schemes and processing entities be independent in terms of accounting, organisation and decision-making processes. The objective: prevent the schemes from leveraging dominant-card-scheme positions to extend market power into the processing market, where the EU regulatory architecture wants competitive entry by processors operating independently of any one scheme. For Portugal, the SIBS model — where the Multibanco scheme governance and the SIBS processing back-end have historically sat inside the same corporate group, owned by the Portuguese banking-system shareholders — is the model that IFR Artigo 7.º most directly stress-tests.

The BdP Determinação — Three Years of Adaptation

The Banco de Portugal, as the competent national authority designated for the IFR enforcement under Lei n.º 82/2017 and the broader RGICSF framework (Decreto-Lei n.º 298/92), issued a specific determinação on SIBS FPS setting out a multi-year compliance plan to implement the IFR Artigo 7.º separation requirements operationally. The plan ran nearly three years from initial determinação to the implementation deadline, with regular BdP oversight on the progressive separation of: (i) governance bodies between the Multibanco scheme and the SIBS-FPS processing function; (ii) accounting and management-control infrastructure; (iii) commercial and operational decision-making; and (iv) the operational interfaces between the scheme-rules side and the processing-execution side.

SIBS implemented the multi-year plan and, by SIBS's own representation, completed the compliance programme by the end of 2024. The dispute crystallised when the Banco de Portugal — on SIBS's reading — expanded the regulatory requirements beyond the original three-year-plan perimeter, on the supervisor's interpretation of the IFR text and the parallel work at the EU level on the further-build-out of the scheme-processor separation framework. SIBS's position: the expanded requirements rendered the original compliance plan inoperable in its plain-text form and constituted, in administrative-law terms, a fresh determinação subject to a separate procedural challenge.

The Filing and the Withdrawal Timeline

The procedural timeline of the dispute:

• 2021-2024 — Multi-year SIBS compliance plan under the original BdP determinação, with regular regulatory oversight.
• Late 2024 — SIBS reports completion of the compliance programme; supervisor signals further requirements on the expanded reading of IFR Artigo 7.º.
• 15 January 2025 — SIBS-FPS files an administrative action at the Tribunal Administrativo do Círculo de Lisboa (TACL) contesting the expanded determinação, on the grounds that the supervisor's interpretation exceeds the IFR Artigo 7.º plain-text framework and that the expansion was procedurally defective.
• 8 May 2025 — Banco de Portugal institutional signal that it will conclude its substantive assessment independently of the court process, in the supervisor's standard pattern of treating administrative-court challenges as separate-track procedural risk that does not gate the operational supervision tape.
• 29 April 2025 — Banco de Portugal files its formal contestação at the TACL, presenting the regulator's substantive defence of the determinação on the IFR-and-RGICSF framework and the precedent-and-comparative reading from other EU national-competent-authority enforcement cycles.
• 13 May 2026 — SIBS-FPS files the desistência da acção (withdrawal of the action) at the TACL, formally closing the procedural challenge without a merits decision.

What the Withdrawal Means — and What It Does Not Mean

The withdrawal is procedurally a desistência da instância — SIBS walks away from the specific action without prejudice to the underlying substantive position. The SIBS-vs-BdP regulatory relationship continues to run on the operational-supervision tape; the company remains subject to the BdP's compliance determinações on the IFR Artigo 7.º framework, and the supervisor's standard toolkit (administrative-sanction regime under the RGICSF, the IFR-specific sanctions framework under Lei n.º 82/2017, the bank-conduct-of-business framework under the Aviso n.º 8/2009 and the parallel updates) remains available.

What the withdrawal does appear to signal: a SIBS read that the cost-and-time of the procedural challenge — measured against the realistic prospect of a substantive win at the TACL on the IFR-interpretation merits, with the supervisor having already filed its contestação and the EU-level work on the scheme-processor separation continuing to harden — does not justify the institutional-bandwidth allocation. The procedural-and-litigation track is one of several available channels for an institution that disagrees with a supervisor's determinação; the operational-engagement-and-compliance track and the EU-level-advocacy track at the European Banking Authority (EBA) and at the European Commission DG-FISMA on the IFR-review cycle are the structurally parallel channels.

The Multibanco-and-MB-Way Operational Context

The dispute matters to the Portuguese banking-and-payments infrastructure because Multibanco is structurally the central pillar of Portuguese-resident payments — the 11,500-plus ATM network, the 180,000-plus POS terminals at retailers across the country, the cheque-and-direct-debit clearing infrastructure, and the MB Way mobile-payments product that has carried the Portuguese instant-payments adoption curve from below 20% in 2019 to above the EU average through 2025. MB Way alone now processes several hundred million transactions per year, with the cross-border SEPA Inst expansion (announced in April 2026 for the 13-country first-wave rollout, with the in-store cross-border payments expected from 2027) extending the product surface meaningfully.

For foreign residents, the SIBS-vs-BdP file matters indirectly: the regulatory architecture that the BdP is enforcing aims at the long-run competitive-entry-by-processors dynamic that, in the EU policymaker's reading, should over time deliver lower merchant-fees and tighter consumer-side fee transparency — both of which feed through to the Folheto-de-Comissões reform we covered Tuesday evening at the BdP Relatório de Supervisão Comportamental 2025. The Folheto reform (consumer-side fee disclosure, multi-year, with the 2028 implementation horizon) and the IFR Artigo 7.º enforcement (scheme-vs-processor structural separation, ongoing) are different files but sit on the same conduct-of-business-and-competition policy tape at the Banco de Portugal.

The SIBS Shareholder Tape and the Governance Layer

SIBS is owned by a syndicate of Portuguese banking-system shareholders — the principal stakes held by Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD), Millennium BCP, Santander Totta, BPI, Novobanco, Bankinter Portugal, and a smaller minority across the mutualist-savings-bank and credit-cooperative perimeter. The governance challenge that IFR Artigo 7.º addresses — preventing the schemes from leveraging the dominant-scheme position into the processing market — is structurally pointed at exactly this kind of bank-syndicate-owned scheme-and-processor model. The implementation of the separation, on the BdP's reading, has run through governance-body changes (separating the Multibanco-scheme board from the SIBS-FPS-processing board), management-and-staffing separation, and operational-systems separation.

The EU Layer — IFR Review and PSR Pipeline

The dispute lands at a moment when the EU-level interchange-and-payments-services regulatory framework is itself in evolution. The European Commission's review of the IFR — under the EU's standard regulatory-review cycle, with the European Banking Authority providing technical advice — has been progressing through 2025 and 2026, with the prospect of either an IFR amendment or a fresh regulation on the scheme-processor-separation framework. The parallel Payment Services Regulation (PSR) and the Payment Services Directive 3 (PSD3) pipeline, both of which the European Parliament and Council are working through, will reshape the broader payments-services regulatory architecture in the 2027-2028 implementation window. The Banco de Portugal's enforcement of the current IFR Artigo 7.º framework on SIBS is one input into that EU-level review and into the harmonised supervisory practice that the EBA and the national competent authorities are converging on.

What Comes Next

With the SIBS withdrawal lodged, the next observable steps: (i) the TACL closes the procedural-challenge file on the desistência; (ii) the BdP-SIBS operational-supervision tape continues at the standard cadence, with the supervisor's compliance assessment running in parallel with the EU-level review; (iii) any further BdP determinação on the SIBS-FPS perimeter will be subject to its own administrative-law-review pathway, with SIBS retaining the right to challenge a fresh determinação in the administrative court if it considers the substantive grounds warrant the procedural cost; (iv) the broader Portuguese-payments-system tape — MB Way cross-border expansion, the Volta deposit-and-return system on beverage packaging launching this year, the Banco de Portugal Folheto reform, the consumer-credit-and-mortgage disclosure cycle under the parallel updates — continues to advance on its own timeline, with the SIBS-vs-BdP file as one of several conduct-of-business-and-competition pieces on the policy board.

Source whitelist compliance: Banco de Portugal institutional disclosures — Tier 1, bportugal.pt — including the Relatório de Supervisão Comportamental 2025 (12 May), and the regulatory framework Aviso n.º 8/2009. Diário da República — Tier 1, dre.pt — for the underlying RGICSF (Decreto-Lei n.º 298/92), the Lei n.º 82/2017 (sanctions regime applicable to violations of EU Regulation 751/2015), and the corresponding administrative-law procedural framework. European Commission and European Parliament — Tier 1, ec.europa.eu and europarl.europa.eu — for Regulamento (UE) 2015/751 (Interchange Fee Regulation), and for the IFR-review and PSR / PSD3 pipeline. European Banking Authority — Tier 1, eba.europa.eu — for the harmonised supervisory framework on the scheme-vs-processor separation. Tribunal Administrativo do Círculo de Lisboa — Tier 1, tribunais.org.pt — institutional venue. SIBS Forward Payment Solutions and the Portuguese banking shareholder syndicate (CGD, Millennium BCP, Santander Totta, BPI, Novobanco, Bankinter) — Tier 1 corporate institutional. Observador (observador.pt), Público (publico.pt), ECO (eco.sapo.pt), Jornal de Negócios (jornaldenegocios.pt), Notícias ao Minuto (noticiasaominuto.com) — Tier 2 — for story discovery and the 13 May 2026 withdrawal report, with the Público account behind paywall and the SIBS-side narrative of the original January 2025 filing carried in the ECO and Notícias ao Minuto reports. Portugal Post not consulted (blacklisted).