Bank of China plans to go ‘local’ in Mexico

05/17/2018 Reuters

China’s fourth-largest bank by assets is pushing into the Mexican market, aiming to meet the needs of large Chinese companies increasingly eager to expand into Mexico, a senior executive said on Thursday.

Diego Folino, one of the executives leading Bank of China’s expansion strategy into Latin America’s No. 2 economy, said that for the first time the lender would provide several loan products, wire transfers and basic treasury services.

Bank of China Mexico received a license from the Mexican banking and securities regulator two years ago, but Folino said it only recently received approval to offer its services and would now seek out the largest Chinese and Mexican companies.

“There are about 70 strong Chinese companies already investing in Mexico and Chinese financial institutions must follow them,” Folino, the deputy chief executive of Bank of China Mexico, told Reuters in an interview.

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Mexico’s Pemex says testing crude for import could start in July

05/16/2018 Reuters

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Mexican state-run oil company Pemex expects to begin testing light crudes as soon as July for possible import, looking to boost margins at its domestic refineries, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

Pemex has for decades exported crude oil but has hardly ever imported the commodity, preferring to process domestic crudes at its six refineries in Mexico.

Pemex Chief Executive Officer Carlos Trevino said the company would likely seek imports resembling its proprietary Isthmus grade of light crude, the production of which has been declining in Mexico.

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Mexican Presidential Frontrunner Tells BlackRock CEO He Will Not Expropriate Private Property via @forbes

05/15/2018 Forbes

BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink met with Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador on May 7 in Mexico City in what a top advisor to the front runner described as a “very affable meeting,” Reuters reported. “There was an immediate click between them. They both left the meeting charmed,” Carlos Urzua, told Reuters of the one-hour long meeting, which he attended. Urzua has been tapped by López Obrador as the country’s new finance minister if he wins the July 1 elections.

In a Mexican TV interview the same day, López Obrador, who has a double digit lead in the polls, said that he told Fink that he would uphold the rule of law and fight corruption, and would not expropriate private property. “They have lots of information…they’re intelligent,” López Obrador said about BlackRock after meeting Fink.

He said that he met with Fink because the company, which has $5.4 trillion in assets, asked to speak with him, “so we could get to know each other,” according to Reuters.

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Mexico central bank to create cyber security unit after hack via @reuters

05/15/2018 Reuters

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s central bank said on Tuesday that it was creating a cyber security unit, following a hack on a domestic payments system at the end of April that affected Mexican banks.

The central bank said in a notice in the government’s daily gazette that the new unit would design and issue guidelines on information security for the country’s banks, which are supervised by the central bank.

Central bank Governor Alejandro Diaz de Leon said on Monday that the country had seen an unprecedented attack on payment system connections and that he hoped that measures being taken would stop future incidents.

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Mexico’s banking system misplaces $18M to $20M in transfers via @washingtonpost

05/14/2018 The Washington Post

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s banking system has somehow misplaced between $18 million and $20 million in electronic transfers between banks, authorities said Monday, the latest in a series of embarrassing breakdowns that have affected debit card purchases and e-payments across the country.

Mexico’s central bank and regulatory agencies said they are not sure whether the problem with settlement transactions among banks was the work of outside hackers, an inside scam or errors.

But in a country where phishing emails and freelance debt collectors often use banks’ logos and letterheads, it is no secret that bank security standards are lax.

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Business Hates Mexico’s Presidential Front-Runner. And He Doesn’t Care

05/09/2018 Bloomberg

Source: Eneas De Troya, Flickr

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sharing a stage with crates of coconuts and limes, looks out upon a crowd of thousands: a sea of sombreros bobbing in the sun. They’re farmers, mostly—or used to be, before the North American Free Trade Agreement upended the old traditions here in the Mexican heartland. Now, many take whatever jobs they can find and lament that so much corn, Mexico’s iconic national crop, is now imported from the U.S.

López Obrador—or AMLO, as he’s widely known—assures the crowd that their dreams of returning to their farms are within reach. After he wins the presidential election on July 1, he says, he’ll provide them with free fertilizer and cheap fuel, and he’ll establish minimum price guarantees for homegrown crops. The fields here in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas will spring back to life, which will provide people with jobs and, in turn, stem the outward flow of migrants to America. But for this chain of prosperity to kick in, there’s one condition: An electoral deathblow must be struck against the ruling political class, a group López Obrador references in terms this rural audience appreciates.

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Mexican Fintech: The Future Of Financial Technology In Mexico

05/05/2018 Forbes

On this day renowned for marking Cinco de Mayo, let us also celebrate Mexico’s achievements in the fintech industry. Although Mexican banks were forced to move to alternative networks after hackers attempted to attack their real-time payments network this week, the country has made some significant moves in the financial technology industry of late.

March 2018 saw Mexico’s lower house of Congress approve a bill to regulate fintech in the country, promote financial stability and in turn, put a stop to money laundering. The bill was approved by the Mexican Senate at the end of 2017, but is awaiting President Enrique Pena Nieto’s signature.

According to Reuters, the law will provide assurance and better awareness when it comes to crowdfunding and the rules around cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin. It also permits open banks and sharing of data by financial institutions through public application programming interfaces, more commonly known as APIs.

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