Novobanco made €367.2m in six months, 15.6% less than a year ago
The drop comes from one-off costs tied to the sale to Groupe BPCE and a higher effective tax rate. Lending grew 5.9%, deposits 7.7%, and the CET1 ratio climbed to 19.2%.
Novobanco closed the first half of the year with a profit of €367.2 million. The same six months last year produced €434.9 million, which makes for a 15.6% fall.
The bank’s explanation rests on two things, neither of them commercial. The first is the one-off cost of the sale to Groupe BPCE, the French deal that formally got moving this half and completed on 30 April. The second is a higher effective tax rate, with the tax bill up by close to 38%.
Add operating costs, up around 12%, and the operating result fell 13.1% to €466.7 million.
The underlying business held up
On the measures that track day-to-day activity the picture is different. Net interest income was essentially flat, edging up 0.8% to €563.3 million. Lending grew 5.9% year on year and deposits 7.7%.
The CET1 ratio, the capital cushion, went from 17.4% in December 2025 to 19.2% at 30 June, a 180 basis point strengthening explained largely by March’s shareholder decision not to pay a dividend on 2025 earnings. The filings sit in the bank’s investor relations section.
A French bank’s first Portuguese half-year
That is the framing for everything else here. This is Novobanco’s first reporting period inside BPCE, France’s second-largest banking group. A good share of the costs that pulled profit down are by definition non-recurring, since a change of owner does not happen every half-year.
What is not yet visible is what changes next, from the branch network to lending terms. And the deal is not an outlier: it fits a year in which foreign capital has moved into whole blocks of the Portuguese economy, from the bids to supply CP’s high-speed trains to overseas funds buying up property portfolios.
By Beatriz Mota
Photo: Kolforn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
