Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD), Portugal's largest bank and its only state-owned one, plans to hire around 1,000 people over the next five years, chief executive Paulo Macedo said this week, with hiring increasingly concentrated in artificial intelligence and data analytics rather than the compliance-heavy roles the bank has favoured in recent years. Macedo made the announcement at the "Fora da Caixa" event the bank organised in Lisbon, according to Portuguese business outlet ECO.
The bank has been shifting its hiring priorities, Macedo said: control, risk and legal roles used to dominate recruitment, but "these days, we're mostly hiring for AI and analytics," he told the audience, according to ECO's reporting.
A big bet on technology
The hiring push comes alongside a technology investment CGD says will land somewhere between €800 million and €1 billion. Macedo said the bank is open to spending more if it turns out to be warranted. On the artificial intelligence side specifically, CGD has already trained more than 1,000 staff to use Microsoft Copilot or similar AI tools, and wants to expand that to 6,000 licences, an acknowledgment, in Macedo's own words, that the technology will likely be outdated by the time everyone has access to it, but a worthwhile path regardless.
The push isn't happening in a vacuum. European banking supervisors have been pressing lenders to keep investing in technology even at the expense of shareholder payouts: a member of the European Central Bank's Supervisory Board argued in March that banks should consider retaining dividends specifically to fund tech investment, and the ECB reportedly wrote to the leaders of Europe's largest banks last week urging them to develop concrete plans for managing the risks AI poses to the sector.
Part of a broader hiring wave in Portuguese banking
CGD's plans line up with a wider trend: Portugal's banks employed 51,636 people at the end of last year, the highest headcount since 2014, the year of the Banco Espírito Santo (BES) collapse and resolution, after which Portuguese banking employment fell sharply for years. New hiring now looks different from the roles that vanished after 2014, skewing toward technical and analytical skills rather than traditional branch and back-office banking work.
Macedo used the same appearance to argue that Portugal's public bank needs a meaningful footprint in the housing market, dismissing the idea of a state bank content with a token few percent of market share, and pointed to €640 million in mortgage lending last month alone, or €2.5 billion over the past four months, as evidence CGD is competing seriously for that business.
Why it matters for anyone banking here
For residents and expats who use CGD, or are weighing whether to, this points to a bank actively investing in the digital and AI-driven side of its operations rather than winding it down, relevant if you've noticed more chatbot-style support or app features lately, since that trend looks set to continue rather than reverse. It's also a data point on the broader state of Portugal's banking sector: a public bank with a 150-year history is expanding, not shrinking, and is doing it around technology rather than by adding traditional branch staff. Whether that translates into better service for ordinary account holders, as opposed to just a leaner-looking headcount on paper, will depend on execution over the next five years rather than on today's announcement.