Peru has cycled through five presidents over the past five years amid impeachments, imprisonment and even suicide. Nevertheless, the country has had the rare distinction of delivering economic growth even in the face of political mayhem. Growth jumped a healthy 13.4% last year, one of the fastest rates in Latin America, largely driven by a pandemic…
Nu Pagamentos is heading for IPO this week. The bank has had a meteoric rise in the Brazilian banking firmament which has little precedents. Nubank, as the digital bank founded in 2013 is known has no physical branches. Its staff is about 5% of its competitors’ workforces and its assets are a minuscule fraction of…
Colombian banks will be among corporates bearing the brunt of the new tax reform, recently submitted by President Iván Duque’s government in an attempt to close the country’s fiscal gap. On July 20, the government sent a revamped tax bill to Congress, after a botched first attempt faced massive repudiation and sparked violent protests. Corporations, and…
In 2014, the state of São Paulo, one of Latin America’s most heavily urbanized areas, experienced a particular climate change effect. It suffered a historic drought that lasted for more than two years. “We had to take short showers,” said Christopher Wells, Banco Santander SA’s global head of environmental and social risk. “It makes you…
Retail investors’ attempts to engineer a short squeeze like the one seen in the U.S. last week have so far not been successful in Latin America. And it is unlikely that they will be any time soon — at least in similar scale and magnitude, — analysts told S&P Global Market Intelligence. Inspired by the GameStop Corp. frenzy,…
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic rattled markets, more than 1.5 million Brazilians ventured into it for their first time in 2020. Despite GDP falling by as much as 5% and dollar returns in Brazilian equity deep in the red, the mass of retail stock investors in Brazil doubled in size last year. Individual accounts in…
A lot of uncertainty still exists around how Argentine government policy will make the country’s sovereign debt sustainable, Alejandro Werner, the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere director, said during an April 8 webcast hosted by S&P Global Ratings. The IMF and Argentina have been in conversation for months to restructure roughly $44 billion in debt…
The country’s finance minister has called major banks a “cartel” with sky-high interest rates. With the introduction of both open banking and PIX, the central bank is looking to change that. Brazil finance minister Paulo Guedes didn’t mince words. During a recent congressional hearing, he called the country’s banking federation, Febraban, and its largest banks…
Manaus, the capital of and largest city in the state of Amazonas, Brazil.Source: Adirana Fuchter/Moments via Getty Images If clients won’t go to the branches, then the branches must go to the clients. In 2010, Banco Bradesco SA embarked on an innovative financial inclusion endeavor. It launched a floating bank branch into the Amazon basin…
Both traditional banks and financial technology firms have benefited from a surge in digital account openings during the COVID-19 pandemic, though questions remain on how some of these companies can monetize these new customers. The country’s three largest private banks added 3.5 million digital clients in the first half of the year, averaging a roughly 7.7%…