After 40 Years, Portugal's Multibanco Teaches Its ATMs to Speak

For anyone who has swapped dollars or pounds for euros in Portugal, the blue-and-yellow Multibanco logo soon becomes as familiar as the Atlantic breeze. Four decades after its first cash-dispensing beep, the country’s home-grown ATM network has introduced a new party trick: an Artificial-Intelligence voice that gently reminds you to retire o seu dinheiro before you walk away. The update is more than a quirky birthday gift. It highlights how a system that began with nine machines in Lisbon and Porto has grown into an indispensable civic utility for residents, newcomers and tourists alike.

A fixture every newcomer learns to love

International arrivals often underestimate the breadth of services that live behind the humble Multibanco slot. Beyond cash, the network lets users pay utility bills, top up transport passes, transfer funds instantly through MB Way, and even pre-load their annual IRS tax payments—all in English at the touch of a button. Because every major Portuguese bank plugs into the same grid, locals enjoy fee-free withdrawals nationwide, a relief for expats used to patchy interbank cooperation elsewhere. The system’s ubiquity means that even in the Alentejo hinterland you are rarely more than a village café away from a Multibanco terminal.

From nine cash points to 13,000 multitaskers

When the first terminals went live on 2 September 1985, Portugal had just joined the European Economic Community and still handled most payments in cash. Today roughly 13,000 machines blanket the mainland and islands, enabling more than 90 separate operations and processing billions of euros every month. According to SIBS—the private consortium that runs the network—Multibanco has become a global case study in how a small country can punch above its weight in payment innovation. Its open architecture has allowed additional functions, such as university tuition payments and motorway toll top-ups, to be bolted on without ripping out hardware.

The soundtrack of a 40-year-old upgrade

What’s new this week is the AI-generated audio guidance. Press the tactile dot on the number 5 key and the machine will speak, a boon for people with visual impairment and, frankly, anyone juggling bags of groceries. SIBS spent months feeding Portuguese-language data into a speech engine to build a tone that sounded neither robotic nor too casual. The result is a voice that lands somewhere between a radio newsreader and your tech-savvy cousin. For now the prompts are exclusively in Portuguese, but engineers hint that multilingual support—including English—could surface in future updates.

Will foreigners notice a difference?

If you hold a local bank card, nothing changes beyond the pleasant chime of a fresher voice. Tourists sticking foreign Visa or Mastercard plastic into a Multibanco terminal will still face the international withdrawal fee imposed by their home bank, not by SIBS. Expats who rely on MB Way’s smartphone app for instant peer-to-peer transfers will see no interface changes; the AI resides only in the physical machines. Crucially, the upgrade did not require downtime, so commuters catching early trains at Santa Apolónia never lost access to their morning cash.

Looking ahead: quiet giant of Portuguese fintech

SIBS’s chief executive, Madalena Cascais Tomé, calls Multibanco “Portugal’s first great agent of digitalisation,” and the company shows little sign of coasting on past achievements. Upcoming pilots include contactless NFC withdrawals, deeper integration with Portugal’s new digital-identity card, and an expansion of instant SEPA transfers to non-euro accounts. For foreigners settling in Portugal, the message is clear: tuck your foreign app wallets into a back pocket, but keep that Multibanco card close. The network that once whispered soft analog beeps now speaks with an AI accent, and it is likely to keep rewriting the soundtrack of everyday life in Portugal.