Banco Solidario S.A.

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What it is

Banco Solidario was created in 1996 as a financial-services institution focused on serving the poorest segments of the population and micro-enterprises. It operates under the supervision of Ecuador’s Superintendencia de Bancos, and its core business — then and now — is lending to micro-entrepreneurs and wage-earners who have little or no credit history.

Its products include microcredits, savings accounts, insurance and the flagship “Olla de Oro” — an immediate loan secured against gold jewellery, which lets a client with no credit file borrow against an asset they already own. The bank calls itself Ecuador’s first bank with an explicit social mission and says it has brought more than 1.7 million Ecuadorians into the formal financial system.

As of the most recent data, Banco Solidario ranked twelfth among Ecuador’s private banks by total assets. Its network spans 4 branches (sucursales), 48 agencies, and 52 of its own ATMs across Ecuador.

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Who owns it

There is no single controlling family or state shareholder. The principal shareholders are a collection of development-oriented foundations and social institutions, including the Fondo Ecuatoriano Populorum Progressio, the Swiss Foundation for Technical Cooperation (Swisscontact), INSOTEC (an Ecuadorian socio-economic research institute), and the Centro de Promoción y Empleo para el Sector Informal Urbano, alongside several individual shareholders.

This consortium ownership reflects the bank’s founding purpose: its equity backers are organisations whose own mandates are poverty reduction and financial inclusion.

Exact ownership percentages by shareholder are not disclosed in available public sources, though the bank’s investor-relations page confirms the governance structure is guided by a formal Corporate Governance Code covering shareholders, directors and management.

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Who runs it

The General Manager (CEO) is Fidel Durán, who also oversees Corporate Affairs (Avelina Pérez) and Compliance (Edgar Revelo) reporting to the General Management. Durán has led the bank for at least eight years, making him one of the longest-serving heads of any private bank in Ecuador.

The board (Directorio) sits above management and its composition is published on the bank’s corporate-governance page, though individual director names were not accessible from available sources at time of publication. The CFO is not separately named in publicly available documents.

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The money, in plain words

At September 2025, total assets stood at $776 million — down roughly 9.5% from December 2024 (our calculation from the Class International Rating data). The December 2024 gross loan portfolio was $696.7 million, a 17.7% annual decline, driven by a deliberate tightening of credit profiles as loan delinquency rose across Ecuador’s banking sector.

The bank is profitable but barely so right now: the return on assets (ROA) stood at 0.14% and return on equity (ROE) at 0.76% as of September 2025 — meaning for every dollar of assets the bank earns less than 0.2 cents, and for every dollar that owners have invested it earns less than 1 cent per year. Both figures are well below the average for Ecuador’s comparable private banks.

The rating report notes that additional income from non-lending sources was what kept the 2024 result out of loss territory.

The balance sheet is solid nonetheless: the bank’s capital adequacy ratio — the cushion of owners’ money held against potential loan losses — was 18.32% at December 2024 and rose to 19.55% by September 2025, comfortably above the regulatory minimum of 9%. The share of assets that are actually earning money (productive assets as a share of total) stood at 91.16% at December 2024, better than the average for peer banks.

As of June 2024, the bank held $265 million in foreign funding earmarked for microcredit disbursement, and cites an impeccable repayment record with international lenders. That record is why rating agency Class International Rating assigned the bank’s bonds an AAA– rating in November 2025 — the highest available, with a small minus to reflect the squeeze on profitability.

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What it is doing now

In 2024, the bank’s financial-inclusion rate — the share of clients who were previously unserved by formal finance — was 18%, and it continued channelling its 2022 Gender and Inclusion Social Bond (issued with BID Invest support) to vulnerable borrowers.

The most pressing operational story is the rise in loan delinquency. The bank’s overall loan risk ratio was 6.00% at September 2025 — 3.13 percentage points above the median for comparable private banks.

Management has responded by tightening credit criteria, which explains the loan-book contraction, and by leaning on non-interest income to protect the bottom line.

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What to watch

• Loan quality: The delinquency rate of 6.00% at September 2025 is already well above the private-banking peer average of 2.87%. A further rise would pressure provisioning costs and could push the bank into a net loss.
• Profitability recovery: Results deteriorated in both 2023 and 2024; whether the bank can rebuild margins as Ecuador’s economy stabilises will determine whether its social mission has a financially durable platform.
• Foreign funding renewal: The $265 million in international credit lines is central to the microlending model; any tightening of terms from multilateral lenders would constrain new lending capacity.
• Capital capitalisation pace: The most recent paid-in capital increase, of $3.55 million, occurred in June 2024, funded by retained earnings — watch whether 2025’s thin profits allow another injection to sustain the cushion.

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This is news, not investment advice.