“A week and a half ago I had a meeting with a company I’d never heard of in a small town in Mato Grosso," says Philip Searson, COO of new banking advisory firm Archx Capital. "The owners were billionaires – they had relationships with one of our partners who had been a career banker at Banco do Brasil, so I’d gone to see them.”
Searson has been in Brazil for 20 years, and in his career – especially in his 11 years at Bradesco as head of debt capital markets – he has travelled extensively across the country.
An Irish national whose Dublin accent persists, his ease in relating this anecdote to Euromoney relies on the common understanding within banking that the scale of dispersion of Brazil’s wealth is hard to comprehend.
“They were in the business of loteamentos [selling land packages for residential development], and then the son had gone into construction – a homebuilding company. They told me: ‘You should come back, there are another 15 families in town who are also billionaires that would love to talk to you’. Fifteen billionaires – and I’d never heard of the town.”
Today, with GDP rates in the country’s interior – the traditional agricultural heartlands of the country – growing at a much faster clip than the more traditional environments for corporate and investment bankers, there is lots of attention being paid to what is dubbed ‘emerging Brazil’.
