JPMorgan Chase & Co plans to add 1,500 workers to its Buenos Aires corporate centre over the next five years to expand one of the bank’s global hubs for technology, operations, finance and legal services.
The bank already has 3,500 employees in the Argentine capitol working at the global hub, and is “working on a longer-term real estate plan to accommodate” the expanded team, Alfonso Eyzaguirre, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Latin America and Canada and head of Latin America investment banking, said in an interview in New York.
Argentina’s skilled workforce, English-language proficiency and alignment with US time zones help make it a strategic hub for JPMorgan. Companies including technology consultant Accenture Plc and online retailer MercadoLibre Inc also have thousands of employees in Argentina, benefiting from the nation’s favourable labour laws and a long tradition of nurturing technology and engineering careers.
JPMorgan opened a branch in Argentina in 1948, and the Buenos Aires strategic hub was created in 2014, when the New York-based bank transferred some functions there from places such as India and the United States.
The firm this year has also been boosting the number of employees dedicated to serving clients in Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Eyzaguirre said, adding that the company’s decision to combine its commercial bank with the corporate and investment bank globally in January was “great news” for the region.
“Now that we’re totally integrated, we will be able to serve clients of the legacy commercial bank in countries in Latin America where we were not covering them,” he said.
Before combining it with the corporate and investment bank, JPMorgan’s Latin American commercial-banking business operated only in Brazil and Mexico. The business, which serves everything from start-ups to firms with annual revenue of about US$2 billion, is now able to deepen its coverage in the region, according to Eyzaguirre.
To serve Latin American clients, JPMorgan has a total of about 3,500 employees in banking operations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, as well as in a representative office in Panama. The number also includes employees that serve Latin American clients from Miami, London, New York and Switzerland.
JPMorgan serves more than 700 local corporations in the region, as well as financial institutions, most Latin American governments and more than 1,500 subsidiaries of multinationals, according to Eyzaguirre.
The payments business, which includes cash management, Treasury services and transactional-banking services, has been a main focus for hiring and investment in Latin America this year, he said. The buildup is almost complete in Mexico, while JPMorgan is making “significant progress” in Brazil.
“There’s an opportunity to serve subsidiaries of multinationals and local companies in their respective countries that demand general cash-management services in local currency,” Eyzaguirre said.
JPMorgan has seen strong interest from investors to visit Argentina as President Javier Milei completes his first year in the office, “because they want to see for themselves what’s going on,” Eyzaguirre said. Next year “hopefully we will start seeing more activity in equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions.”
He also sees medium and longer-term opportunities in Mexico, even amid “all the noise around tariffs, immigration,” a bearish equity market and currency devaluations. “The nation has a totally integrated logistical system with the US and an industrial base that has been in place for 30 years,” he said, adding that that would help the country benefit as the US economy expands.
Eyzaguirre also expects Mexico’s pension funds, so-called Afores, to double assets under management through 2030 from about US$330 billion now.
“We’re also looking for more opportunities in markets where we don’t have physical presence, such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Dominican Republic,” Eyzaguirre said, adding that that includes doing more episodic transactions that have a more complex structure. As an example, he cited a US$1-billion “debt-for-nature swap” for El Salvador.
In Brazil, JPMorgan is putting “some effort” into the booming local debt market, but the bank doesn’t aim to compete with financial institutions that have a stronger local balance sheet, according to Eyzaguirre.
“We are more selective, and look for more complicated transaction structures,” he said, pointing to larger ones and those related to acquisition financing.
by Cristiane Lucchesi & Vinícius Andrade, Bloomberg
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