The resilience of Banco Azteca’s clients as well as their way of adapting to new technologies helped the bank weather one of the worst years in Mexico’s economic history.
On the occasion of the edition The 500 most important companies in Mexico that Expansión does, Alejandro Valenzuela, general director of the bank, tells in an interview that the pandemic forced companies to seek new ways of organizing and operating.
In 2020, Elektra – where Banco Azteca operates – was harshly criticized for not respecting sanitary measures and keeping its doors open, but in Valenzuela’s words that was what helped the bank maintain its solidity throughout the year.
At the end of 2020, the bank reported a portfolio of 103.529 million pesos, that is, a growth of 11% compared to the end of 2019.
“Having stayed open I think that it helped a lot not only to maintain our sources of work but also to bring to fruition the care that we bring to almost 15 million Mexicans we reach,” Valenzuela said.
The bank’s general director for more than six years added that the bank’s loan portfolio grew thanks to the fact that they did not have to freeze their portfolio with the special accounting criteria announced in March.
“What is important is that the Mexican popular sector never stopped working and although we offered our clients to take advantage of these government programs, less than 4% of our clients opted for it and preferred to continue paying and keeping their loans open” , he counted.
Keeping its clients’ loans in force also helped maintain the bank’s delinquency levels and while in the first quarter of 2020 a delinquency rate of 11.9% was reported (thanks to a client in the United States that adhered to Chapter 11) the At the end of 2020, the bank reported a delinquency rate of 4.70%.
Credit was not the only achievement of the bank in 2020. Sending remittances, which in 2020 marked a record year in remittances, also helped the bank since about half of the remittances that arrive in Mexico do so through the Bank.
“Remittances had a growth never before seen, the support and solidarity of our compatriots outside of Mexico was spectacular. Banco Azteca receives half of the remittances that arrive in the country with around 20,000 million dollars,” he said.
Although the bank’s delinquency level was high compared to other banks, it had better delinquency levels than its direct competitor BanCoppel, which closed the year with delinquency levels of 6.6%.
The manager said that only 4% of his clients requested a deferral of their credit and of this percentage only 2% stopped paying. That is, of the almost 70,000 million pesos that the bank has in consumer credit, about 1,400 million pesos are those that the bank has already given up for lost.
“The resilience and adaptability of the Mexican popular sector must be applauded,” said Valenzuela.
The bank was no stranger to the digital revolution that was experienced with the pandemic, Valenzuela assures that Banco Azteca made great progress in terms of digitization and in months a strategy was implemented that in other circumstances would have taken years. The bank’s application was one of the ones that grew the most and currently has more than .7 million more than in 2019.
Faced with this growth, the bank assures that it will invest heavily in the following years because they seek to make its application agile, with minimal friction and to solve its clients’ problems in a timely manner.
For Valenzuela, the efforts will not only be in the digital part: “We are working on both fronts because we are among those who think that the digital part without a physical part is flawed and the physical part without the digital one is doomed to disappear,” he said. .
