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New York Firm Triples Revenue With New Brazil Currency Business

New York Firm Triples Revenue With New Brazil Currency Business

(Bloomberg) -- “It’s a party!”

That’s how Fabio Solferini describes revenue growth his firm racked up after adding a foreign-exchange bank to its businesses in Brazil. The figure tripled in April from a month before, he said, declining to give specific numbers.

New York Firm Triples Revenue With New Brazil Currency Business

INTL FCStone Inc., where Solferini is the local unit’s chief executive officer, opened the bank on April 2 and started to handle currency transactions of any size, eliminating a $100,000 limit and other restrictions that apply to firms without a currency-bank license.

With plans to more than double the number of clients in Brazil to about 1,500, the New York-based company has boosted capital in the South American nation sixfold since January 2017, Solferini said in an interview. Clients include about 600 Brazilian firms, mostly from the agribusiness sector, and international companies and funds investing in the nation, he said.

INTL FCStone already had a broker dealer in the country trading futures for commodities, exchange rates, interest rates and equities. It also provides risk-management advice, with an expertise in commodities. It has 150 employees in eight offices in Brazil and one in Paraguay. The plan is to open two more offices through 2019, one in Campo Grande in Mato Grosso do Sul state, and another in Primavera do Leste in Mato Grosso, Solferini said.

The brokerage firm has capital of 38 million reais ($11 million) in Brazil, after two capital increases last year, while the foreign-exchange bank has 10 million reais, he said. Foreign-exchange banks in Brazil have much smaller capital needs, and are permitted to only trade exchange rates.

To contact the reporters on this story: Cristiane Lucchesi in Sao Paulo at clucchesi5@bloomberg.net, Josue Leonel in Sao Paulo at jleonel@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson, Dan Reichl

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