BTG Pactual’s recent success has been based in large part on the digital platform that it has built in recent years. The bank targets opportunities where financial deepening, disintermediation and technological adoption intersect in Latin America.
The year under review was no exception; BTG has won best bank in both Brazil and Latin America this year, the result of a successful marriage of banking strategy execution with digital innovation.
The bank’s senior management, led by chief executive Roberto Sallouti, continued to roll out new digital products in 2021, such as the cash-back credit card for its retail clients called Invest+ and its personal finance management tool Financas+.
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The latter uses big data and artificial intelligence, which BTG is also deploying to boost revenues by identifying sales opportunities for clients through behavioural analytics. The bank points to this as one of the key drivers of the impressive R$166 billion ($32.5 billion) in net new money in its retail segment.
BTG also uses big data to automate counterparty credit analysis, balancing the automated opportunity for revenue growth with risk-management control.
Digital innovation is far from being just a retail phenomenon. BTG launched a digital small and medium-sized enterprise product in 2021 – a segment of Brazilian banking with which it was not previously associated.
BTG Empresas provides supply-chain credit financing and transactional products to SMEs and enables digitally onboarded clients to access the bank’s products in the areas of credit, guarantees, insurance, investments, forex and derivatives.
The bank now has an SME credit portfolio of R$17 billion.
And BTG’s digital story doesn’t neglect its institutional client base. In the past year it launched two tech-enabled services for institutional clients. The first, Banking as a Service, provides banking services to some of the world’s largest retail companies (Alipay and PagSeguro for example) and operates e-wallets for more than 40 retail companies in Brazil that do not have sufficient technological financial infrastructure to do so independently.
Meanwhile, BTG Solutions provides clients with back-office services in the areas of risk management, portfolio management and trade execution in a fully automated and digitalized manner.
The bank has been investing heavily in tech for many years and migrated to the cloud in 2016.