Brazilian banking association Febraban, capital markets group Anbima and stock and futures market operator BM&FBovespa have officially launched Brasil Investimentos & Negócios (BRAiN), a campaign and project aiming to turn the country into Latin America’s premier financial center for investment and business, with an initial focus on Chile, Colombia and Peru.

“We aren’t proposing to transform São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro into the [exact same] position that New York and London have now [in international financial markets],” the project’s lead executive Paulo Oliveira told BNamericas. “We believe in the concept of the [Latin American] network, which creates the need for a hub between the cities of the region.”

This message was less muted in the official statement from the project.

“Many transactions with Brazilian and Latin American assets that today take place in London and New York could be done here [in Brazil], in the new scenario that BRAiN will help to create,” BM&FBovespa executive director Edemir Pinto said in the statement.

REGIONAL INTEGRATION, LANGUAGE BARRIERS

While Argentina and Mexico will certainly eventually play an important role in the project, BRAiN will start out concentrating on working with regulators and exchanges in Chile, Colombia and Peru, where conditions are better suited to expansion, Oliveira said, noting that work groups had already been set up in these countries.

Asked how the language barrier of Portuguese to Spanish and vice versa would play into the integration efforts, the former BM&FBovespa executive said there would be special attention paid to improving language education for Brazilian companies and that the exchange operator would make Spanish an official language for filings and other communication.

BRAiN will also be known as “Brazil Investment Network” in English and “Brasil Inversión & Negocios” in Spanish, he said.

BRIDGE BETWEEN MARKETS

Previously known as “projeto Ômega” (the Omega project), the organizers created the joint project “to act as a bridge between Latin American markets and global markets,” a statement from the groups said.

The project will highlight Brazil for its institutional, political and economic stability, its sustained growth prospects, its opportunities for infrastructure, agribusiness, tourism as well as its already fairly developed financial sector, the statement read.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was hired for the project’s development, the statement said, and representatives of the federal government, as well as from the state and local governments of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, have been participating in the process.

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