This week I was honored to launch the first program to finance PCs for Ecuadorian emigrants in Spain together with Ana Patrícia Botín, President and Chairwoman of Banesto. Intel partnered with Spanish Bank Banesto and with Microsoft to deliver PCs to the families of Ecuadorian emigrants back home. This is very relevant on two fronts, it helps the emigrants and their families to stay together and it provides a tool to Ecuadorian families to get access to better Education and better opportunities to improve their lives. Ecuadorians are the single largest group of emigrants in Spain with about 2 Million people.
As a Mexican you constantly seeing evidence of the drama of the emigrants. I personally was touched many times by people close to me who decided to leave their loved ones in pursue of a better life.
Take for instance Benito, the gatekeeper or “portero” of the first apartment building I lived in Mexico City. Benito was a hard working person that make ends meet by doing a variety of jobs through the day. On top of his main responsibilities he washed cars, did repair work and helped get all kinds of services to people in our building. Unfortunately one day his father got sick and he decided to get him to the best private hospital he could afford. His father was diagnosed with Cancer and the treatment was painfully and very costly. The expenses destroyed Benito’s family finances and he was left with debt, a lot of debt.
So Benito decided to go to the US and work hard to get his finances in shape again. He left his wife and kids and took the journey to the US. He got a job working on a restaurant and was able to provided back to his family in Mexico City. We stayed very close to his family since his wife worked for us after Benito departed.
Every year since then, several times a year his wife’s strongest desire was to see Benito come back. Years started to pass and his kids grew up and Benito was not able to come home. His families finances improved, but not to the point that he needed them to. Christmas time was especially acute as there was every year the hope that this would be the year he could come back home. But every year the same thing happened, Benito could simply not make it back given all the risks involved. The best contact they had was phone calls every now and then using some very expensive and low quality phone service Benito acquired through phone cards. Finally, after more than five years Benito was able to come back home after being diagnosed and treated of a very strange disease in the US.
Millions of families live similar dramas today. Their loved husbands and sons and daughters go very far to get a good job or better education. Fortunately for them support in some countries to the migrants has improved. Fortunately for them too you can now contact your family back through voice and video without any cost (Skype is particularly popular for emigrants). Families can now stay together using technology to keep themselves united. Families can also use technology to get themselves a better education and have access to better paying jobs at home.
This is way the launch of the Conecta Latinoamerica program with Banesto is so relevant. The program is so simple and yet some of its details are incredibly hard to implement for traditional banks. Under the program, an Ecuadorian emigrant can buy a financed PC in Spain with zero interest rate. The Bank provides a loan and sends an order to a qualified local PC integrator in Ecuador who builds the PC, delivers and installs it on the house of the emigrant back home in Ecuador. The details seem to be very simple, but they are very hard to achieve form many banks in the world. I´d like to highlight the leadership of Ana Patricia Botin to make this wonderful program a reality.
There are two main benefits for the emigrant and his/her family. First, they get a tool that allows them to communicate and stay close with their loved ones back home. Secondly, the emigrant family gets a high end tool to access better education and have access to better job opportunities and some other life improving capabilities.
For Banesto, it is a program that allows them to address the emigrant market, a very dynamic segment of the population in Spain. There are about two million Ecuadorians and more than 10 Million legal emigrants in Spain and the number continues to grow every day. It is a program that is clearly showing leadership of the Bank to access new market segments where the social component is as relevant as the business component.
The next step is to make the program successful and export it all over Latin America and in other places in Africa and Eastern Europe as Ana Patricia Botín, the Banesto Chairwoman commented at the program launch. There are millions of families like Benito’s that badly need it today.
If you are an Ecuadorian emigrant living in Spain, please contact your closest Banesto branch for more details.
