About

Since moving in-house to join the prominent financial services company Grupo Bancolombia in 2010 as a senior associate in their investment banking division, Carlos Aldana has progressed quickly in Colombia’s banking industry. He gained a promotion to legal head of Valores Bancolombia in 2013 before becoming the legal head of structuring, sales and trading of securities in 2015. Today, in the capacity of legal director for capital markets and corporate finance, he excels in providing legal advice on major company transactions as evidenced in May 2018 when the legal team he led were gained an industry award in the US for “Deal of the Year” in the debt and equity category. He says his career path at the company has allowed him ‘to grow within the organisation, and acquire with each step new responsibilities for different legal issues within the corporation and its subsidiaries’. Aldana highlights a number of career highlights whilst working for Grupo Bancolombia such as working on notes issuances has allowed him to gain an understanding of the capital market structures within Colombia, the US and Central America. To this end he was heavily involved on the issuance of the Group’s first Basel III-compliant notes in 2017, which guaranteed the Bank’s position within the new Basel capital requirement and saw Aldana help solve the difficulties of interaction between two highly complex capital market regulations. In the previous year, Aldana was commended for his contribution towards the issuance of Bancolombia’s green bonds, the first sustainable finance bond released by a Colombian private company. He also stands out for his work on structured finance deals that have contributed a substantial amount of the resources needed to develop Colombia’s infrastructure such as the financing of the 4G program, the project that has guaranteed Colombia a new generation of roads and highways by way of project finance, and private investment. In addition, the aforementioned award his team won was the alliance between the Fondo Inmobiliario de Colombia and Almacenes Exito, the biggest chain of supermarkets in an alliance that consolidated one of the biggest private equity funds in Colombia, focused exclusively on property development, and real estate investments. Aldana also has strong credentials in the area of M&As. Regarding this in particular, he has the following to say: ‘These experiences have taught me the importance of looking beyond the legal conditions for closing a deal, but have made me consider the strategic and broader impacts of the decisions we take on the negotiating table. It has taught me the meaning of belonging to an international organisation and made me think bigger and beyond my role as in-house lawyer, but as a key player in my organisation’. Finally Aldana is also commended for integrating legal teams that worked on a variety of topics to make them a truly interdisciplinary unit, which is able to adequately inform and advise the wider organisation on its legal strategy as well as launch of Investbot, the robo-advisor by Bancolombia, the first of its kind. Demonstrating how this positively impacts the company and its customers, he says it is a ‘tool that has refocused the strategy of the brokerage firm, and has given new opportunities of investment to clients of all ages and incomes, and thus all risk profiles’.