Portugal — EIF launches InvestEU Fomento-FEI, EUR 490 million guarantee to mobilize EUR 6.5 billion for SMEs and MidCaps

Mechanism

The InvestEU Fomento-FEI is a new InvestEU Member State Compartment instrument jointly structured by the Portuguese Government, the European Commission and the EIF (part of the EIB Group), channelling EUR 450 million from Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan, a EUR 50 million State Budget public guarantee, and EUR 490 million of EIF resources into a guarantee facility. The measure was included in the latest amendment to Portugal's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (measure RE-C05-i16, InvestEU Member State Compartment), submitted 1 February 2025 and approved by the European Council on 13 May 2025. The EIF guarantee lets partner banks — selected via an EIF Call for Expression of Interest, with first transactions expected before end-2025 — offer lower interest rates, reduced collateral and down-payment requirements, longer maturities and increased financing volumes, including to previously-excluded segments such as startups. The programme targets over 40,000 Portuguese SMEs, small MidCaps and individuals investing in innovation, digitalisation, sustainability, competitiveness and agriculture, and is expected to mobilize more than EUR 6.5 billion of investment — the largest InvestEU Member State Compartment volume of any EU country to date.

Downstream implications

• Horizontal SME/MidCap credit-support instrument rather than a

sector-targeted industrial-policy intervention; no named target sector, country, or material.

• Adds to a growing 2025 wave of EIF/EIB InvestEU Member State Compartment and

guarantee instruments across EU member states (Spain, Estonia) that use national RRP allocations to leverage EIF-guaranteed bank lending at scale.

• Once partner banks are selected under the Call for Expression of Interest,

actual credit deployment and sector mix will become visible through individual bank-level EIF agreements.

Open questions

• Which Portuguese banks will be selected as the guarantee's channelling

partners, and the sector/geography split of the resulting EUR 6.5 billion in financed investment, are not yet public.

• No breakdown yet of how much of the mobilized capital will flow to

agriculture versus innovation/digitalisation/sustainability/competitiveness categories.