If you check its website, you will see that it is a bank like others: it offers loans for houses, cars and accounts in which you can deposit your money. The American Capital One arrived in Mexico, but it is not coming to compete with Banorte or BBVA. He's not here to do banking, wow.
His arrival is as atypical as his Mexican project. In one of his presentations to the national public, his representatives went to a scenario that does not coincide with the sobriety of the financial environment: a speakeasy in the Juárez neighborhood, one of those legal, but provocatively dark bars that allude to the clandestinity of the whiskey prohibition era in the United States.
A meeting organized by a vibrant organization of young experts in product generation, called Product LatAm, revealed the nature of the plan: to generate just that, technological products and services for the American public. Everything, from Mexico City.
How relevant is that? Keep proportions, but imagine Apple without Steve Jobs, without generating new products like the iPhone or iTunes, at the time.
That is why what happened there on Thursday during a dinner among pieces of art exhibited at the Tirasavia, in Bucareli, is important when the Guadalajara Judith Gonzalez He explained his purpose.
The vice president of technology at Capital One in Mexico – a financial group whose value of 57 billion dollars exceeds BBVA's 53 billion, worldwide – explained the following to a group of about 25 people:
Under the former HP and Wizeline executive, Capital One will create a technology center to manage complete end-to-end ownership of products for its current and future global customers.
Attention. When it comes to technology, companies usually come to Mexico to reduce costs; to maintain existing projects or to increase the size of your team to have available talent.
What this industrial engineer heads from now on is the comprehensive management of banking products throughout their entire life cycle, from conceptualization to implementation. It involves overseeing all aspects of the product: development, design, procurement, and strategy implementation. The goal? That the product satisfies customers and is successfully delivered to the market. The bank's survival depends on it.
Unofficial sources warn that González, an expert in pedagogy who recently taught at ITESO in Guadalajara, will seek over the next three years to form a team in Mexico with some 1,500 creative experts in financial regulations, technology, software…
Eye. Capital One reported this year to US authorities that the average total annual compensation of its employees is 93,157 dollars, equivalent to about 135,000 pesos per month. This includes both cashiers and their managers and directors.
They must provoke a reaction to a huge volume of competitors in the United States.
Last week the president of the bank, Richard D. Fairbank, explained the context to financial analysts. He said that on credit cards alone, consumers can choose between more than 4 thousand issuers.
“A card issued by a small credit union can be used everywhere a card issued by a bank like Capital One can be used, anywhere in the world.”
Hence the need to differentiate itself with new products for this organization that jumped from 11th to 7th place in its country, when it completed the purchase of Discover Financial Services in February in an operation valued at about 35 billion dollars.
I was able to talk to other young, tech-savvy, New York-based Capital One employees who were visiting Mexico last week.
They say that despite the size of the conglomerate, an atmosphere of startuptypical effervescence in growing companies, largely also because Fairbank, who founded that bank in 1988, is still present in the company.
Capital One's goal faces an important challenge: hiring technology experts in a country where many companies urgently require them. Will the shortage cause an increase in supply? We will see.
