Latin America's best bank transformation 2020: Scotiabank Chile

Scotiabank Chile wins the award for the region’s best bank transformation.

Ignacio Deschamps, group head of international banking and digital transformation at Scotiabank, describes the opportunity to buy BBVA’s operations in the country as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

It is easy to understand why.

Both legacy Scotiabank and BBVA had a 7% market share in loans. Simple arithmetic would place a combined entity in joint third place in the banking system, equal to the 14% each market shares of Banco Estado and Banco Credito.

That places the bank not too far behind leaders Santander, with 19%, and Banco do Chile (17%). Even so, the bank was wary of the execution risk of the merger.

Francisco Sardón de Taboada, country head of Chile for Scotiabank, says the bank conducted a study of previous Chilean banking mergers and its findings were worrying.

“On average, these took four years and the combined entity lost 200 basis points in market share,” he says.

To maximize the success of BBVA’s integration, Scotiabank started by appointing a leadership team.