“It is not the center of Lisbon or Porto that will solve the housing problem”

Bank

• Housing continues to be an issue on the agenda and the main banking representatives understand that it is time to start implementing what has already been diagnosed and that we already know how to resolve it.
• Portugal is “king of diagnosis, in terms of execution, it’s another matter”, notes Pedro Castro e Almeida.
• The great expectation is how the lack of supply will be resolved – quickly. “25 thousand houses were built and we, all together, financed 157 thousand transactions”, observes João Pedro Oliveira e Costa. And “it is not the center of Lisbon or Porto that will solve the housing problem”, warns Miguel Maya.
• Dismantling bureaucracy in licensing is a solution and Gonçalo Matias guarantees that the Government is working on this.
• “Those who were there before didn’t carry out the reforms because they didn’t create the conditions for it. We spent these 100 days of government creating these conditions”, he says, also referring to the reforms that are planned in the public service and which, consequently, will make life easier for companies and people.
• And speaking of Government measures, the new tax on banking profits that the Minister of Finance, Morais Sarmento, said was being designed to replace the additional tax that was considered unconstitutional was highly criticized by all administrators present at the meeting.
• The opinion is consensual: the bank already pays enough taxes, in addition to what it has already paid to the resolution fund. “We didn’t break any glasses and are we going to pay for the whole party?”, asks, ironically, João Pedro Oliveira e Costa, remembering the almost one billion euros that have already disbursed to the resolution fund.
• Miguel Maya also recalled the €600 million he has already given to the resolution fund, an amount to which will be added an equally large amount that will be announced this Wednesday in the presentation of the results for the nine months of the year.
• Pedro Castro e Almeida recalls the fact that Santander pays “5% of IRC in Portugal” and Pedro Leitão states that the taxes they pay “are worth 2% of the bank’s return on equity”.
• “I hope it doesn’t go any further. I don’t think it makes any sense for us to be talking about tax increases”, adds Pedro Castro e Almeida.

Insurance

• The personalization of insurance, such as the existence of policies designed according to what each client needs and seeks, was one of the topics discussed.
• This evolution depends, in part, on the digitalization of services and internal processes and, although many changes have already been made in this regard, there is still a way to go, especially in internal processes, notes Teresa Brantuas.
• Despite the growing digitalization of the sector – and the economy in general – Helene Westerlind reminds us that the customer must continue to be at the center of everything because “it’s not every day that we choose to pay for something that we don’t know whether or not it will happen”.