About

Formerly an extremely successful and highly-respected external counsel for Creel, García-Cuellar, Aiza y Enríquez and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, Juan Salvador Nito Irigoyen took on his first general counsel role with RSA Seguros (currently SURA Seguros) before moving on to a Washington DC-based role with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Notwithstanding that Juan was extremely pleased with this position, which involved a highly competitive selection process against lawyers from all regions of the world, he jumped at the chance to join AlphaCredit when this opportunity became available in 2014, saying: ‘IDB was a great experience, however when I received the invitation to work at AlphaCredit and be part of a start-up in the finance sector it was hard to say no’. His decision proved to be a prescient one, and his time at the company has been incredibly successful. ‘Since I’ve been at the company’, Juan says, ‘it has grown from 65 employees to more than 3,500, and we have become one of the top three players in our market’. He picks out AlphaCredit’s acquisitions of Total Credit and Grupo Finmart (Crediamigo) as personal career highlights due to him managing to achieve success in a new area: ‘Before working for AlphaCredit I didn’t have a lot of M&A experience; both acquisitions were very important milestones for the company, as well as important knowledge experiences for me’. As well as this, he lists AlphaCredit’s issuance of US$300m international notes under Rule 144A Regulation S as a project he particularly enjoyed. ‘In this transaction I had the opportunity to be part of the company’s roadshow team’, he explains. Completed in eight weeks, a very short time frame for a first issuer, it was an extremely well-executed transaction by him and his legal department.