Tower Corporation

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What it is

Towerbank International Inc. is a privately-held Panamanian bank that is 100% owned by Tower Corporation, the listed holding entity; Towerbank in turn controls several subsidiaries of its own. The group offers personal, corporate, private, and commercial banking across Panama and Latin America, including e-commerce payment solutions, global payment processing, treasury and investments, and digital-asset management.

Regulated by Panama’s Superintendencia de Bancos, the bank also runs a subsidiary, Towerbank LTD, in the Cayman Islands under that territory’s monetary authority. Tower Corporation itself is registered as a securities issuer with Panama’s Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores (SMV) and is listed on LATINEX — but the shares trade thinly and no live market price appears in exchange data.

Who owns it

Tower Corporation’s authorised share capital is US$75 million, divided into 15 million common shares at US$5.00 par value. Key principal identified by Dun & Bradstreet is Benjamin Méndez Kardonki (Kardonski).

The exact percentage breakdown between public float and controlling shareholders is not published in open-access filings post-2017; the SMV’s Acuerdo 18-00 requires annual disclosure of ownership structure, but the most recent annual report filed on the SMV’s public portal dates to 2017.

Not published: the post-2017 ownership split and free float are not disclosed in the SMV’s public filings portal (supervalores.gob.pa), the LATINEX issuer page (panabolsa.com/es/emisor/towc/), or the company’s own investor-relations page. Panama’s Acuerdo 18-00 of 11 October 2000 requires annual disclosure of significant shareholders by listed issuers; whether more recent filings have been submitted to the SMV and kept non-public, or simply not uploaded to the portal, could not be established from available sources.

Who runs it

Benjamín Méndez Kardonski leads the group; under his leadership Towerbank has positioned itself as Panama’s leading crypto-friendly bank while maintaining its foundation in traditional financial services. In addition to banking, he sits on the boards of Perfumerías Unidas, Agencias y Mercadeo, Inversiones Menkar, and Brilatco, among others, and holds a business degree from Bentley University.

Not published: the names of the Chief Financial Officer and formal board chair of Tower Corporation (as distinct from Towerbank International Inc.) are not disclosed in the SMV public filing portal, the LATINEX issuer page, or the Towerbank corporate-information pages reviewed. The 2017 SMV annual report names Alex A.

Canales C. as Contralor (controller) of Tower Corporation at that date; whether that role continues was not verifiable.

The money, in plain words

For a bank holding company, the key scorecard is the size of the loan book and how safely it is funded — not revenue in the usual sense. At end-2024 Towerbank’s capital adequacy ratio — the buffer of owners’ equity protecting depositors — stood at 14.89%, essentially flat on the prior year’s 14.84%, and just below the Panamanian banking system average of 15.04%.

A ratio above the regulatory minimum is reassuring; being a fraction below the system mean is a watch point, not an alarm.

The loan book grew a controlled 2.34% in 2024, driven by faster expansion outside Panama (+14.08%), and at year-end Towerbank had two revolving commercial-paper programmes outstanding — one of US$20M and one of US$50M — with US$35.1M in use. The group paid out US$4.5M in dividends on common and non-cumulative preferred shares during 2024.

Not published: consolidated revenue and net profit for Tower Corporation for any year after 2017 are not available from the SMV public-filings portal, the LATINEX issuer page, or the company’s own investor-relations site. The D&B aggregator estimates Towerbank’s revenues at approximately US$54.9M and Tower Corporation holding-only revenues at approximately US$27.6M, but D&B does not disclose the source period or methodology, and these figures cannot be cross-referenced against a primary audited document.

The most recent full audited financial statements in the public domain, held at the SMV, date to 31 December 2017 and showed consolidated assets of US$979M. Panama’s Acuerdo 18-00 requires annual audited statements from listed issuers; it is not clear from available evidence whether later filings have been submitted to the SMV but withheld from the public portal.

What it is doing now

Towerbank’s most ambitious current initiative is Ikigii — a hybrid platform that merges a crypto wallet with a traditional US-dollar bank account in a single app, allowing users to manage fiat and digital currencies, make real-time conversions, and take out crypto-backed loans. To support the digital rebuild, the bank moved 95% of its core operations to cloud-based platforms in ten months through a partnership with technology providers Mambu and AWS.

In 2022 Towerbank formally declared itself crypto-friendly; the “Crypto Friendly Account,” a product co-created with clients, became the turning point in its digital strategy. Towerbank partnered with Chainalysis for transaction monitoring and due diligence tools to keep crypto onboarding compliant at scale.

What to watch

• Disclosure gap. The holding company’s annual reports have not been publicly uploaded to the SMV portal since 2017. Any investor relying on Tower Corporation’s listed equity is working without recent audited numbers — an unusual situation for a registered public-issuer.
• Capital ratio vs. system. Towerbank’s capital adequacy of 14.89% trails the Panamanian banking average of 15.04%. Watch whether the ratio widens or narrows as the loan book grows.
• Crypto regulation. Towerbank’s 2022 crypto pivot was a “bold move met with some skepticism” as Panama’s banking association had taken a conservative stance. How regulators in Panama and Latin American client countries treat digital-asset banking will define how far Ikigii can scale.
• Outside-Panama loan growth. The loan book outside Panama grew 14.08% in 2024 — the fastest-moving part of the balance sheet. Rapid regional expansion at a mid-size bank with a thin capital buffer deserves close monitoring.

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This is news, not investment advice.