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The ongoing transformations in Brazilian socioeconomic levels and consumption profiles over the last 4 years are leveraging opportunities in a number of segments.  The addition of more than 20 million people – 11% of the population – from SES level D into SES C officially transitioned them from “non-consumers” to “consumers.”   However, inflation and interest rates threaten to spoil a happy ending.

The number and sophistication of ATMs in Latin America continues to grow, heralding changes in how the machines contribute to the customer experience as well as to the emergence of new business models for banks and network operators. The ATM in Latin America is moving from being a cost-saving substitute for window tellers to a dynamic machine capable of reloading cellular accounts, making tax payments and becoming a nimble advertising touch-point.

In Q4, 2007, Kroll-InfoAmericas surveyed over 60 Latin America regional C-level managers to learn how they were conducting strategic planning, in pursuit of best practice recommendations that we subsequently shared with participants.  Two observations quickly came to light.  First, strategic planning is a relatively new functional responsibility for the Latin American regional offices of multinationals, and one that continues to challenge them.  Second is the duality of strategic planning as an art and a science.  The traditional information-driven model of strategic planning (science) is too rigid for an information-poor region like LatAm, while one based on managerial experience and intuition (art) lends itself to subjectivity and is difficult to defend in the global office.  

During recent months, the real estate sector has slid into decline as the speculative bubble that ran wild in the past few years has punctured. Fraudulent activity in the real estate sector in recent years helped fuel the bubble, and is making adjustment all the more painful.  The result is unpaid debts that must be foreclosed by the financial and banking institutions, which have granted millions of dollars in loans to bankrupt individuals.  In some states, particularly Florida, this process was accompanied by an inflow of capital from Latin American countries with high political and economic instability in search of safe investments.