Latin America and Caribbean

The frontrunner in the Argentine presidential election campaign has said he wants to abolish the peso and replace it with the US dollar. Is it blue-sky thinking or just greenback dreaming?

Private bankers are eyeing PE and venture capital investments as digital platforms emerge in Brazil, but personal advisory remains critical.

The Brazilian bank is focused on new initiatives aimed at boosting active-user rates, including a new global app and buy-now-pay-later product.

Second-quarter results from Brazil’s largest banks, published over the first half of August, revealed a bounce in financial performance. But it may be premature to dismiss further asset-quality deterioration down the line.

Trade and currency wars have boosted Brazil’s agribusiness sector in the past couple of years. Higher prices for soft commodities have, however, accelerated a trend that has been noticeable for many years: the country’s inward focus.

How many Brics are there in a dollar?

The country’s economy was already weak before a serious drought hit. Now it is broke, and the question in Buenos Aires isn’t whether finance minister Sergio Massa can muddle through to the presidential election at the end of October, it is whether he can make it to the primaries in August before a full-blown financial crisis.

The evolution of Brazil’s central bank payments programme could be good news for banks.

UBS’s acquisition of Credit Suisse will further reduce the number of large international private banks in Brazil. Julius Baer has been quick to take advantage of this.

The country’s banking system seems as solid as ever, but its banks are seeing an uptick in delinquencies that could spin out of control.

The echoes of 2014 have been loud in Brazil’s private banking industry over the past 12 months. A precipitous fall in interest rates – followed by a meteoric rise – has left the market completely the same but also very different.

When the news broke that Argentina was thinking of merging its currency with that of its neighbour, Brazil, my immediate question was: which Argentine peso?

The bank’s chief financial officer says Inter is moving into an expansion phase, following an ambitious and aspirational ‘north star’.

Will 2023 be Brazil’s year – or Mexico’s?

The bank’s new head must withstand political pressure to extend subsidized credit and lower underwriting standards.

A persuasive case can be made for nearshoring, but so far in Latin America there has been little direct evidence that it is happening. In Mexico, things are about to change.

Nearshoring has been seen to drive credit growth among the country’s smaller regional banks.

The region’s advantage is likely to be short-lived and could fade by 2024, according to JPMorgan's private bank head.

Local flows to fixed income and equity redemptions limit ECM liquidity.

Restrictions on redundancies force out larger banks in Mexico from bidding for business.

Uruguay reignites the debate on transition finance with its sovereign sustainability-linked bond.

The bank is focusing on organic growth by acquiring retail clients and launching a private bank.

Proactive risk tightening in 2021 sees surging return on equity as scale brings operational leverage.

The market reaction to the third-quarter results from Brazil’s second-largest private bank has revealed investor sensitivity to banks’ deteriorating asset quality.

Bank’s ESG head urges competitors and regulators to respond more quickly to emissions accounting challenge.

While fintechs have been thriving in Brazil and throughout Latin America, the region’s local stock exchanges have failed to attract IPOs.

Brazil’s agribusiness sector is booming on the back of sky-high commodity prices. The public banks that have long financed the sector now face a wave of new private-sector competitors.

The Brazilian world of digital banks has it all: billionaire unicorns, sub-brands created by the incumbents and completely new disruptors. But one player has been quietly growing under the radar to become the country’s second-largest digital player.

The new administration is expected to be less receptive to bank privatization as the result boosts ‘Lula portfolio’ stocks.

The market for remittances is expected to grow by almost 10% in 2022, driven by diaspora-linked savings.