Felipe Garca Ascencio is the general director of the Santander bank in Mexico. The bank reported an increase in its net profit for 2023 of almost 10% compared to the previous year.

The expectation is that its new digital arm, Openbank, will attract clients that traditional banking has not been able to attract. This is a time of transformation in the financial sector, with fintechs becoming increasingly popular and new players seeking a banking license. Many of these companies will be present at the banking event to be held on April 18 and 19 in Acapulco. The interest we see from investors, both national and foreign, is that, regardless of who wins, Mexico has become an incredibly attractive country due to a geopolitical issue. Changes in geopolitics have made the United States want to have the provision of goods and services much closer to home. We have free trade agreements with more countries than practically any other economy, monetary policy has been very prudent, and fiscal policy, until this year, was very prudent. Fiscal prudence is something that must be taken up again. External factors have played a very important role. The measures that have been taken to try to get out of the economic crisis have meant that many of the correlations that we normally had for economic and financial variables are no longer the same. I would hope that in the following years, we return to a normality like the one we had previously in which, if rates rise, the economy slows down, and if rates fall, it accelerates. We think that in Mexico and the United States, it should work very well. What we are looking for is for the customer experience to be as good as what the four Openbank banks that we have in Europe have demonstrated, which is significantly superior to that of traditional commercial banks. It is a 100% digital platform that the Santander Group has not taken to high-growth countries with a young population and a relatively low level of penetration. These are the conditions under which fintechs perform particularly well.