Awards for Excellence 2018
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Mexico may now be the world’s 15th largest economy, but approximately 38 million Mexican adults are still unbanked – roughly the size of the population of Canada. Education and job creation have been a focus of the Mexican government; one bank in the country stands out for its efforts to help that progress by providing financing solutions, Citibanamex, which wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for sustainable finance.
In June last year, the bank, on behalf of Mexico’s ministries of finance and education, issued school infrastructure bonds for a total of Ps5,500 million ($305 million) to improve 33,000 schools in the country. Afore Citibanamex, one of the leading pension funds in the local market with over $40 billion in assets under management, invested in the school infrastructure bonds.
The following month, Citibanamex, on behalf of Mexico’s development bank, Nafin, priced the country’s first social bond alongside HSBC. The five-year Ps4,000 million deal is being used to finance projects across Mexico, from job creation through small enterprise development to investments in energy efficiency that will reduce utility costs for low-income households.
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Ernesto Torres Cantu |
Later in the year, the bank, under CEO Ernesto Torres Cantu, also issued a Ps200 million bond for CAME, the second largest microfinance institution in the country, which serves over 370,000 clients, 70% of whom are women microentrepreneurs.
In environmental finance, Citi has been one of the key banks involved in the green financing of Mexico City’s new airport development, which is aiming to be the world’s most sustainable airport. The investment bank was one of three global coordinators on the $4 billion two-tranche bond from the Mexico City Airport Trust.
Such social finance initiatives complement Citibanamex’s work in financial inclusion, where the bank is hoping to change the landscape in Mexico. Last year, the bank increased the reach of Transfer, its mobile payments operator, by partnering with convenience store chain Oxxo; in 2017, more than three million Mexicans set up a Transfer account, 85% of whom did not previously have a bank account. By the end of March this year, more than seven million accounts had been opened.
