Banco LAFISE Honduras, S.A.

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What it is

Banco LAFISE Honduras is the Honduran arm of Grupo LAFISE — whose name stands for Latin American Financial Services — a Nicaraguan-origin financial group created in November 1985. The Honduran bank provides personal and corporate banking, including loans and digital solutions.

The group entered Honduras in 2004 by acquiring Banco Futuro. Over four decades Grupo LAFISE has built a diversified conglomerate spanning banking, insurance, securities, fiduciary services, logistics, real estate, and education.

Who owns it

Grupo LAFISE — the regional financial holding — is the controlling parent; it was created by Roberto Zamora Llanes, a Nicaraguan entrepreneur who had been a Citibank vice-president of treasury in Venezuela before striking out on his own. He started the group in 1985 with US $75,000 in personal savings.

Not published: the exact percentage stake that Grupo LAFISE holds in Banco LAFISE Honduras, S.A., and the size of any free float, are not disclosed in the BCV public filings page, the CNBS supervisory register, or the bank’s own investor-relations site as available at the time of research. Honduran securities law (Ley del Mercado de Valores, Decreto 8-2001) requires issuers to disclose material shareholding changes to the CNBS, but a complete ownership breakdown was not found in any publicly accessible filing.

Who runs it

The group is led by its founder, Roberto Zamora Llanes, who chairs and controls it. His sons Roberto Zamora Terán and Diego Zamora Terán serve as Executive Directors of Grupo LAFISE alongside him.

Not published: the name of the country-level CEO or General Manager of Banco LAFISE Honduras specifically is not disclosed on the bank’s public corporate-governance pages (which list only the group’s mission and values) or in the CNBS supervisory register as accessible at the time of research.

The money, in plain words

Not published: annual revenue, net profit, total assets, net margin, and return on equity for Banco LAFISE Honduras for the year ended 31 December 2024 could not be extracted from primary sources. The bank’s own financial-statements page lists the audited statements to 31 December 2024 and 31 March 2025, but the underlying PDFs were not machine-readable at the time of research.

The CNBS publishes PDFs of audited financials for all supervised banks, including Banco LAFISE, but does not provide structured numeric data through its public web interface; the direct PDF for Banco LAFISE 2024 on the CNBS server returned a file-not-found error at the path tested. This is a transparency gap that the CNBS’s own supervisory rules require to be filled — the institution is profitable (see below) but the exact numbers remain inaccessible without the raw PDF.

What can be confirmed: shareholders approved a primary capital increase of HNL 248 million (≈ US $9.3 million at the prevailing rate), of which HNL 200 million came from capitalising profits earned in 2021–2023, and HNL 48 million from fresh cash injections by shareholders in 2022 and 2024 — meaning the bank was generating real, retained earnings across that period. Converting profits to capital rather than paying them out as dividends is a sign management is focused on growing the balance sheet.

What it is doing now

The most recent visible move is the official launch of the LAFISE Digital app, the bank’s new mobile banking platform, which replaces and upgrades the earlier Bancanet service. Grupo LAFISE currently operates across eleven countries — the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Spain, and Honduras is one of the group’s three full banking markets alongside Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The capital increase also aligns with requirements set by the CNBS, Honduras’s banking and insurance regulator, signalling that the bank is building a bigger cushion to support loan growth — the standard playbook for a mid-sized bank aiming to take on larger corporate clients.

What to watch

• Financial transparency. Banco LAFISE Honduras lists its 2024 audited statements publicly but they are not machine-readable. Investors and analysts should monitor whether the bank begins publishing structured financials on the BCV or CNBS platforms, as peer Honduran banks have started to do.
• Capital deployment. The HNL 248 million capital raise (≈ US $9.3 m) sets the stage for loan-book expansion; watch whether credit growth outpaces the system average in CNBS monthly data.
• Digital pivot. The LAFISE Digital app launch is the group’s clearest regional bet; adoption speed in Honduras will signal whether the bank can compete with the larger, better-capitalised domestic incumbents on cost and convenience.
• Succession and governance. With Roberto Zamora Llanes’s sons Roberto Zamora Terán and Diego Zamora Terán now Executive Directors, the group is mid-way through a generational handover; how that plays out will shape strategy across all markets, including Honduras.
• Macroeconomic risk. The Honduran economy grew at a moderate pace in 2024, supported by household consumption and exports; any slowdown in remittances — Honduras’s economic lifeline — would hit consumer credit quality directly.

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This is news, not investment advice.