About

Twice the president of the Ecuadorian Banking Law Committee of the country’s banking association, Jorge Alvarado has been head of legal at Banco Promerica, since its founding in 2001, indeed, ‘I took up this post the day the bank opened its doors to the public’, he notes. As such, he has built the department from scratch, and has sought to instill it with a pro-active, pro-business posture, grounded in teamwork and ‘based on principles not rules and with leadership rather than bosses’. Externally, he is currently involved in one of the largest corporate transactions of recent years in the Ecuadorian financial sector, the acquisition of a 55% majority stake in Produbanco, which will see Promerica jump from being the eighth to the third largest bank in Ecuador. Alvarado has led on the process from initial negotiations and due diligence through to regulatory approval and foresees an entirely new wave of operational challenges and legal retrenchment on which he and his ten-strong team are already working in parallel. Citing business-performance expert Ichak Adizes, he notes that he thrives on ‘being part of an organization that conceives of its self as an organic whole, and that lets one visualise, reinvent and adapt oneself on an ongoing basis’. Concurrently he admits that one of the most difficult challenges has been that of learning to delegate. ‘The role of the in-house lawyer implies the taking of decisions within a flexible framework but always accompanied by the responsibility of minimizing risk. Having a corporate perspective, in addition to the sense of belonging it bestows, converts this into a strategy: the role should regard itself not as “ex post” but rather “ex ante”‘.