António Horta-Osório graduated in Business Management and Administration from the Portuguese Catholic University (1987), having completed an MBA at INSEAD in 1991 and an Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2003.
He has had a long and successful career in banking, which began in 1987 at Citibank, followed by Goldman Sachs in New York and London. In 1993 he joined the Santander Group and created Banco Santander de Negócios Portugal (BSNP), becoming its CEO. He has held various management positions in Santander as CEO in Portugal, Brazil and the United Kingdom, where he transformed Abbey National, acquired Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley during the Great Financial Crisis and merged them into Santander UK in 2010. In 2000, he was appointed Executive Vice President of the Santander Group and a member of the Management Committee. In a personal capacity, he was Non-Executive Director of the Bank of England between 2009 and 2011.
In 2011 he was appointed Chief Executive Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, at the invitation of the UK Government, to lead the turnaround of the Bank, partially nationalised, following Lloyds' acquisition of HBOS, and succeeded in returning the bank to private ownership in 2017, with full repayment of taxpayers' money.
In May 2021 he took office as Chairman of the Board of Credit Suisse, a position he held until January 2022.
In June 2021 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his work in banking and voluntary services in the areas of mental health and culture. He has received several honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and the Portuguese Catholic University. Among other honours, he has been awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit (Commercial Class), by the President of the Portuguese Republic; the Encomienda de Numero of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, by H.R.H. the King of Spain; and the title of Commander of the National Order of the Southern Cross, by the Brazilian Government.
Since April 2021, he has been Chairman of the Board of Directors of BIAL. He is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Strategy Committee of the Impresa media group (since September 2022). He has been a non-executive director of the Champalimaud Foundation since 2011; non-executive director of INPAR, holding of the Lemann family, since 2014; non-executive director of José de Mello (since September 2022) and a Senior Advisor at Mediobanca and Cerberus.
Married, he is the father of three children. His hobbies include tennis, diving, collecting Portuguese decorative arts and chess. He has Portuguese and British nationality.