The first Shared service centres in Portugal were established in the 1990s and remarked a rapid growth mainly since 2015. Since this year, 58 new shared services were established in the country, representing 62% of total sites.
Foreign direct investment plays an important role in this industry, as more than 90% of the sites are foreign-owned and nearly 90% provide services internationally, thus promoting exports of high-value added services.
Most of the sites are captive, providing services in-house, and the most common functions include finance, human resources, procurement, supply chain, customer service, IT, master data, compliance and legal and data analytics, among others. According to the maturity level, many centres are implementing, or already implemented, Robotic and Process Automation solutions and AI technologies, enabling them to automate transactional activities and thus achieving higher productivity.
The main reasons why Portugal is chosen often include the availability of talent with the appropriate skillsets, a wide range of different languages capabilities, appropriate time zone to cover different geographies and good flight connections with major destinations in Europe and North America.
