Awards for Excellence 2018
Mexico may now be the world’s 15th largest economy, but approximately 38 million Mexican adults are still unbanked – roughly the size of the population of Canada. Education and job creation have been a focus of the Mexican government; one bank in the country stands out for its efforts to help that progress by providing financing solutions, Citibanamex, which wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for sustainable finance.
In June last year, the bank, on behalf of Mexico’s ministries of finance and education, issued school infrastructure bonds for a total of Ps5,500 million ($305 million) to improve 33,000 schools in the country. Afore Citibanamex, one of the leading pension funds in the local market with over $40 billion in assets under management, invested in the school infrastructure bonds.
The following month, Citibanamex, on behalf of Mexico’s development bank, Nafin, priced the country’s first social bond alongside HSBC. The five-year Ps4,000 million deal is being used to finance projects across Mexico, from job creation through small enterprise development to investments in energy efficiency that will reduce utility costs for low-income households.