Important changes were announced this Thursday by Grupo Security. One of its founding shareholders and member of the pact that controls the holding company, Francisco Silva, stepped aside after 36 years at the helm of the entity.
In replacement of the 80-year-old executive, the board of directors appointed his partner and right-hand man, Renato Peñafiel, historical general manager of the company. Likewise, the current finance and corporate management manager, Fernando Salinas, was appointed as the new CEO of Security.
Peñafiel assured that “these changes respond to a planned process framed in our corporate policies.”
Sources close to the holding company stressed that “Francisco Silva is one of the founders of the group and the results of his management are visible. It is a planned process that has been in the works for some time.”
It was also reported that Silva will remain linked to the management of the company through consultancies. In addition, he will participate in various committees such as digital technology, a theme that he has developed and promoted throughout his career.
In fact, in his last interview with DF he indicated that “if there is a fintech that fits our objectives, we can be interested.”
Silva’s career
Francisco Silva or “Pancho” -as he is nicknamed in the market- is one of the founding partners together with Renato Peñafiel of Grupo Security. A civil engineer from UC and a specialist in anti-seismic engineering from Stanford University, USA, he began his career in banking in 1976, when he became the Finance manager of the former Banco del Trabajo.
In 1979 he was appointed vice president of the former Chase Manhattan Bank Chile. He spent a year in the entity and then moved to the Central Bank (1982-1983) to assume the Operations management position.
From this position he witnessed the biggest financial crisis the country has faced in the last 50 years.
He left the governing body due to a cut in personnel and decided to found a financial consulting firm together with Peñafiel and Félix Bacigalupo -whom he met at the Central-, who baptized it with the name of BPS, after the initials of their last names.
Among the clients they had was the Security Pacific Bank of California. The US firm was interested in the Chilean banking business, and for this, Silva and Peñafiel participated in the growth of the company through the purchase of the Spanish bank Urquijo.
In 1990, Silva became president of Banco Security Pacific in Chile, which later became Banco Security. That same year, the entity merged with Bank of America.
In this process, Silva studied the company’s figures and organized a group of investors, inviting Peñafiel and a group of friends with whom he shared during his career to participate in an offer.
The proposal materialized in 1991 when they bought 60% of the US company and later in 1994 they acquired the remaining 40%. This is how the current Grupo Security was born.
With the economic boom of the ’90s, the company began to grow and in 1995 they completed their IPO. At the end of 2021, they had almost 500 thousand clients and profits of $88,603 million.