“Can a bank-owned national payments switch become an international embedded-payments and open-banking platform beyond Portugal?”
SIBS was founded in 1983 by the Portuguese banking sector to build shared interbank payment infrastructure, launching the MULTIBANCO ATM/POS network in 1985–1987 that remains Portugal's dominant payment scheme. Over four decades, it evolved from a domestic switch/processor into a multi-country payments group (SGPS holding structure with regulated payment institutions SIBS Pagamentos and SIBS Forward Payment Solutions) offering issuing, acquiring, MB WAY wallet, scheme management (scheme MB), card personalisation and open-banking APIs across ~30 countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Its more recent pivot is opening its rails via the SIBS API Market and 'API | Open banking' products to fintechs and non-bank corporates — moving from bank-owned utility to embedded-finance platform.