BTG's Sallouti Presses Digital Strategy in Midsize Banking Push

(Bloomberg) -- Roberto Sallouti feels like he just went through college all over again.

The 47-year-old chief executive officer of Banco BTG Pactual SA, a fixed-income trading veteran, said he spent the past four years digging into subjects such as cloud computing, performance marketing and data-analytics metrics. His schooling was to help with the bank’s push into digital ventures, which has already led to the launch of an investment platform for retail investors and a real estate-backed crypto asset. Now it’s taking BTG into loans for midsize Brazilian enterprises.

The bank has been testing out a digital platform for that purpose, Sallouti said in an interview this week at the company’s Sao Paulo headquarters, an expansion into a business BTG has never explored before. The platform would also sell other banking services from BTG and other fintech firms, similar to what the bank has been offering retail investors.

“The technology revolution allowed a bank like ours to reach segments we’d never reach before, because we lacked distribution,” Sallouti said. “And if you don’t have senior people involved, there’s no way you can push initiatives like that in the bank.”

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Sallouti’s commitment is leading him to California next week, where he’ll speak at a conference for Brazilian executives looking to buff up their Silicon Valley connections -- a step up for someone who jokes that he sometimes has to look up the definition of tech terms on Google during meetings.

The changes at BTG go beyond launching new businesses and sprucing up the CEO’s tech savvy. The bank spent around 300 million reais ($78 million) setting up its digital business in the past three years, including spending on systems, marketing and hiring. In a sign of the ensuing cultural shift at the firm, one of the floors of its headquarters now has a wall covered in graffiti art, “something unthinkable a few years back,” Sallouti said.

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The company has about 300 people working on its digital businesses, many with skills not usually found among bankers. They include video-game designers, former employees from tech giants, architects, people with master’s degrees in philosophy and even a designer who’s also a tattoo artist.

The only places BTG hasn’t been hiring from lately? Banks. “We want people with different mindsets,” Sallouti said. “I think we have plenty of bankers already.”

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