Jorge Velázquez 
Itti is Paraguay’s largest provider of tech and financial solutions. It supplies services to several companies in the country, but its main client is Ueno Bank, Paraguay’s first digital bank, which counts nearly a third of the population among its users.
Both Itti and Ueno Bank are part of Grupo Vázquez, a holding company of 30 firms covering activities including finance, agriculture, tech, insurance, tourism, and sustainable transport.
Through Itti, the group has reached an important milestone in its regional expansion plans: it opened an office in Buenos Aires, where it will concentrate its developer teams.
The company already has a staff of 850 in Argentina, who will now spend part of their time in a spacious Belgrano office kitted out with flowing desks and chill zones with hammocks with privileged views over the Barrancas de Belgrano on one side, and the Aeroparque and the Río de la Plata on the other.
Itti president César Astigarraga told the Herald’s sister title, Ambito, that staff in the Buenos Aires building would continue to work for the group’s other companies and clients in Paraguay. “There are still no plans to offer our services in Argentina,” he underscored.
Miguel Vázquez, President of Grupo Vázquez and third generation of the family holding, attended the inauguration of the office. The lofty twelfth-floor facility is in a modern tower block at the intersection of the avenues Libertador and Juramento, looking out over the River Plate estuary to one side and Belgrano to the other.
Buenos Aires, he explained, has a strategic role to play in the company’s regional expansion plans.
“We are a group with more than 70 years of history. It was started by my grandfather, Miguel Villasanti. Then my father, Víctor Hugo Vázquez, continued it, and about 40 years ago he added the financial sector to the group. I am now the group’s president and our core business is Ueno Bank, the first digital bank in Paraguay and the largest in terms of customers and credit cards,” he said.
How many clients does Ueno Bank have?
Miguel Vázquez: Almost 60% of the adult population are clients of our bank. We have more than 2,500,000 customers, in a country with a total population of approximately 7 million, of whom almost 4 million are economically active.
What other businesses does the group have in your country?
Our main focus is financial, but also technological. A large part of our group’s assets are fintech companies, such as Muv, which is essentially Uber’s competitor in Paraguay.
We also have Monchis, which would be the equivalent of Uber Eats. In addition, the largest travel agency in Paraguay is ours; it’s called Uela, which we launched recently.
We also have cattle ranching businesses, with ranches that belonged to my grandfather 70 years ago. And reforestation fields.
We also operate in real estate, with properties we rent out. In retail we own a shopping mall in the city of Encarnación, on the border with Argentina. We also have a hotel there.
In the financial sector, aside from the bank we also have Ueno Seguros, Ueno Fondos, and Ueno Casa de Bolsa.
Then there’s Upay, which is an acquiring company similar to Prisma in Argentina. We also operate our own network of ATMs. In Paraguay, all the banks combined have about 1,100 ATMs. And we alone have the same number.
We also have Western Union, which is a very important partner, because Paraguay receives a large volume of remittances from Paraguayans working in Argentina, the United States, Brazil, and Spain.
We are also partners of Amazon Web Services and Oracle, among other companies.
The key to our expansion lies in the 2,500,000 customers who can be reached through our applications. That is why our focus is always on technology, on generating new products and more experiences for our clients.
What role does Itti, the company that just inaugurated offices in Buenos Aires, play within the group?
In Itti’s case, we develop solutions for all types of companies, not necessarily in the financial sector. We sell a complete package of technology solutions to the client, whether it’s an entrepreneur, a medium-sized company, or a large corporation.
Today Itti is the group’s company with the most collaborators. There are nearly 3,000 out of the 5,300 total in the group. And of those 3,000, about 800 are in Argentina, where we started operations two years ago.
Do you plan to continue adding people to that team?
Yes. Our idea is to continue growing in Argentina because there is excellent talent here. There are also many people from other nationalities living in Argentina who work with us — for example, Venezuelans, Cubans, among others. All with excellent technical skills.
In Buenos Aires we have the development teams for the bank, the product experience team, and everything related to cybersecurity. Part of the team is in Argentina and another part is in Paraguay.
We decided to set up our development center here after trying with an outsourced provider in India, which didn’t work due to language and time zone differences. We also set up a team in Colombia, but that didn’t work either.
What led you to choose Argentina?
We found that Argentina really has enormous talent in technology. And there are also market factors that make it extremely profitable for us to have teams here. Because they are highly trained people, fluent in English, and with broader expertise than some Paraguayans. Simply because in recent years Paraguayan entrepreneurs have not invested in technology.
So Paraguayans with the mindset to develop products and fluent English went to work for companies like Google or Apple. Some went to the United States and after the pandemic came back. But today it is impossible to make them a job offer because they are essentially at home in Paraguay, in shorts all day, and earning a lot of money.
Still, this makes me proud because it is Paraguayan talent working for the world. But we are left without people in Paraguay, and it becomes difficult to find people at the level we need today.
So we began creating training schools and signing agreements with Paraguayan universities to encourage the training of Paraguayans.
What I also find very positive is that we now have a team made up of people from various countries. We have added collaborators working from Colombia and Ecuador.
In fact, we are planning to open an office in Colombia because we are hiring heavily there.
What are the group’s regional expansion plans?
Today our business focus is in Paraguay, but we are seeking to internationalize the bank and all our products.
In Argentina we are not selling anything yet. We have this office to work for Paraguay. And in the future, it will serve as a hub to support our internationalization plans.
I see Argentina as a highly competitive market, a big market. But we do not intend to enter as a bank in Argentina because there are already enough players. The market is very well covered. Companies like Galicia, Ualá, and Mercado Pago are doing an impressive job. That’s why I don’t see a market for us here.
And in which countries are you seeing opportunities?
In Central America and across Latin America there are many interesting countries, with an idiosyncrasy similar to Paraguay, where there are still many opportunities to bring people into the banking system. That’s not the case with Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia. But there are many smaller countries, with populations of between 7 and 10 million, that are very similar to Paraguay, where I believe there may be opportunities.
