Banco PyME Ecofuturo S.A.

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What it is

Banco PyME Ecofuturo S.A. is a Bolivian financial institution that originated from Ecofuturo S.A. Private Financial Fund, founded in 1999 by four NGOs committed to the development of micro and small enterprises in Bolivia.

In 2014, ASFI issued a resolution authorising its transformation from a private financial fund into a full PyME bank, allowing it to offer a broader product range including foreign trade, trusts and credit cards.

As of 2024, the bank reaches clients through 136 service points across eight of Bolivia’s nine departments. It counts more than 370,000 clients between borrowers and depositors.

Microloans are the core business: they make up 82.82% of the total loan book as of mid-2025, with an average loan size below what the larger universal banks offer. The bank keeps 62% of its portfolio in the productive sector and social housing, meeting the floor set by Bolivian financial-services law.

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Who owns it

FADES — Fundación para Alternativas de Desarrollo — is the majority shareholder, a position it acquired in 2008 when the original lead investor IDEPRO transferred all its shares to FADES. The bank’s shares are publicly registered on the BBV under the “Acciones Ecofuturo I” programme, but the exact ownership percentages of each NGO founding shareholder are not published in any open primary source reviewed (BBV ficha, ASFI prospectus, Moody’s Local reports); under Bolivia’s Ley N°393 de Servicios Financieros, listed banks must disclose shareholder composition in their annual prospectus filings, which list the structure by name but whose PDF text was not machine-readable in this research session.

One named institutional shareholder appearing in the BBV ficha is Inversiones Iturralde S.A. The remaining founding NGO bloc and any free float percentage are not published in accessible open sources; this is a finding, not a gap — Bolivia’s small exchange means shares rarely change hands publicly and full float data is typically disclosed only in prospectus documents.

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Who runs it

Alejandro Bustillos Meneses is General Manager (Gerente General) — the CEO equivalent — confirmed in multiple recent primary sources including the bank’s own LinkedIn page and ASOFIN press coverage. Luisa Marcela Julia Cabrerizo Uzin has served as Gerente Nacional de Finanzas (CFO equivalent), a role confirmed in the ASFI bond prospectus; her current tenure in that role in 2025 is not independently re-confirmed in open sources after 2020, and the BBV ficha’s executive section was not fully machine-readable.

Not published: the current full board composition and chair name are listed in the BBV ficha (bbv.com.bo, “Información al 31DIC2025”) but the PDF was inaccessible during this session; they are not reproduced in any open secondary source reviewed. Under ASFI’s disclosure rules for listed issuers, board composition must be reported quarterly.

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The money, in plain words

Ecofuturo had a difficult 2024: at the mid-point of 2024 the bank was running losses, driven by heavy provisioning — money set aside because some borrowers were not repaying. By June 2025, it had returned to a profit of Bs 4.6M (~$467K), because provisioning costs fell sharply.

Annualised over the first half of 2025, the return on shareholders’ equity (ROAE) was 12.15% and the return on total assets (ROAA) was 0.95% — the equity return is respectable for a microfinance-focused bank; the asset return is thin, reflecting a model where large loan volumes support many small borrowers. Shareholders decided to retain all 2024 earnings inside the bank rather than pay them out — capitalising 100% of profits to strengthen the balance sheet during 2025.

Note on revenue: the Bs. 24.8M figure cited for 2023 in the annual report (≈$2.5M at today’s FX) almost certainly represents a narrow income sub-line — possibly net financial income after funding costs — rather than gross financial income (ingresos financieros) for a bank holding a $556M loan book.

Full annual gross income figures were not available in open primary sources; the bank’s own financial-statements PDF on bancoecofuturo.com.bo was not machine-readable in this session, and ASFI’s prospectus PDFs were similarly inaccessible. Bolivia’s Ley N°393 requires audited annual accounts to be published, but machine-readable access via the regulator’s web portal was not available during this research.

The loan portfolio has grown from $3.4M at inception in 1999 to $555.7M by April 2024 — more than 165 times larger — while equity grew from $2.3M to $59.6M over the same period.

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What it is doing now

The bank raised fresh short-term funding through listed commercial paper (pagarés bursátiles) in 2025, generating a 159% increase in securities in circulation and partly offsetting a decline in institutional-lender funding. Separately, a new equity injection from shareholders is expected — indicating the ownership group is prepared to support the bank’s capital as loan growth and rising arrears put pressure on the cushion regulators require.

For the third consecutive year, the bank earned the international Top Employer 2025 certification, and in 2024 it received Microfinanza Rating’s Gold Client Protection certification — the highest level awarded.

This is news, not investment advice.