By Carlos Hank González, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Grupo Financiero Banorte.
This year, Banorte was proud to be recognized by International Banker as the Best Innovation in Consumer Banking 2026 and Sustainable Bank of the Year 2026 in Mexico.
Why was Banorte chosen for these two pillars? And how did we get here? I’ll take you on a brief tour of our financial group’s transformation and what’s behind these recognitions.
A story of transformation
Banorte has been accompanying Mexican families and supporting Mexican companies for more than 125 years, and we have continually evolved since our inception.
Our story is a history of modern experiences. In an increasingly dynamic environment, it is part of our philosophy to understand the times in which we live and to adapt better than anyone else as we continue to evolve.
The world and technology are constantly changing, as are our customers, and we must not be left behind. We are constantly evolving to remain the Strong Bank of Mexico!
Just over 10 years ago, when Marcos Ramírez and I took on the responsibility of leading Banorte, we embarked on a radical transformation alongside our employees, customers and investors, aiming to become the best financial group in Mexico and a leader in the digital world. Since then, we have experienced an ongoing process of reinvention, while keeping our essence intact: Always put the customer at the center.
Making the ordinary extraordinary
In 2024, we began executing our Strategic Plans 4, 5 and 6, taking advantage of the competitive advantages we’d built over more than a decade and focusing our efforts on advancing toward the ultimate objective of making the ordinary extraordinary for our customers.
But what does this phrase mean? It means we focus on the essentials. If we perform everyday operations—every process, every customer interaction, every product—exceptionally, we can accomplish extraordinary things.
First Pillar: Customer-Focused Innovation.
Our first pillar recognizes that our innovation in consumer banking goes beyond just using technology and highlights our ability to completely transform the customer experience.
Hyper-customization: the heart of the strategy.
In recent years, we have focused on scaling hyper-customization across the organization, aiming to deepen our knowledge of each customer to anticipate their specific needs and offer them tailored solutions.
How do we achieve this hyper-customization? With advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), differentiated communication, micro-segmentations and effective risk management.
In 2025, we scaled our hyper-personalization capabilities across the entire retail segment, enabling us to deliver high-value, tailored offerings at the precise moment and through the most relevant channel, reaching more than 7.2 million clients. Our approach is grounded in an end-to-end understanding of each customer’s profile, context, financial behaviors and lifestage—allowing us to anticipate needs rather than simply respond to them.
The best customer experience.
We seek to become the best experience in the market and achieve the highest customer-satisfaction indicators, thanks to our human-digital care model, which integrates the advantages of artificial intelligence to deliver the ideal services without losing human contact and support from the institution.
We leverage advanced analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence to design dynamic offers that adapt in real-time to behavioral signals, transactional patterns, product usage and shifts in financial needs. Predictive models determine the “next best action” or “next best offer” for every customer, while our omnichannel architecture ensures timely, relevant and frictionless interactions across both digital and physical touchpoints.
It’s not about choosing between efficiency and closeness. It’s about achieving both: Technology combined with human talent is the key to building the bank of the future.
As part of this commitment, we invested 741 million pesos to expand our contact center in Monterrey, a call-and-digital touchpoint, increasing the number of operating positions from 3,000 to more than 5,800 to provide a wide range of services and solutions to our more than 13 million customers.
Our contact center honors the legacy of my grandfather, Mr. Roberto González Barrera, by remaining committed to his vision of opening doors to our workforce, especially for university students.
In our branches, executives use the Client Identification Window, a unified interface that consolidates each customer’s profile, real-time eligible offers (consistent across all channels), recent experiences and sentiments toward Banorte. This empowers executives to deliver informed, consistent and deeply personalized interactions.
A key milestone was the rollout of our executive counter-offer platform, designed to make every interaction truly personalized. Through this platform, executives can instantly recalibrate credit proposals in real-time—adjusting amounts, terms or product types across up to five concurrent offers—each optimized to the client’s needs and capacity to pay. This capability enables Banorte to deliver tailored and interactive solutions within minutes, enhancing productivity across our human-digital ecosystem.
Another core component of our evolution is the development of autonomous circuits that deliver greater end-to-end automation and real-time execution of hyper-personalized offers.
This strategy has materially strengthened our customer relationships and business performance. For instance, our hyper-personalized offer rates are now 13 times higher than those of the non-personalized ones.
Banorte’s strategic plan for the next few years focuses on extending these benefits not only to existing clients but also to new and prospective customers, including walk-ins. We are implementing real-time behavioral analytics and recommendation engines from the first point of contact—whether in a branch or through digital channels—to generate personalized offers instantly and seamlessly.
Best deal on the market.
Thanks to a culture of continuous improvement across all our processes, we are increasingly agile and efficient in delivering products and services, responding to customer needs when, where and how they need them and closely accompanying those who trust us.
Second Pillar: Commitment to Sustainability.
Our second pillar acknowledges that sustainability is at the heart of our business.
International Banker’s recognition highlights our commitment to sustainability, a key pillar within the organization. In this regard, environmental and social components are integrated transversely into our strategic decisions.
A crucial moment: Act today.
We face a crucial moment in the fight against climate change. This is one of the leading global systemic risks with significant impacts on economic stability, safety, human health and ecosystem balance. Collective action is the solution to contain this phenomenon, and we should not wait.
For this reason, Banorte has incorporated climate-risk management into its business model for more than a decade, with the aim of promoting sustainable development and accelerating actions.
Nature, biodiversity and financial decisions.
Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. That’s a source of pride and a responsibility.
For this reason, we include biodiversity in our financial decisions. To do this, we have trained our teams and assessed environmental and social risks for more than 12 years, then redirected financial flows to positive-impact projects, following international best practices.
We are currently driving actions to mitigate global warming, including setting decarbonization goals and implementing measures to move toward net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
Our strategy prioritizes reducing emissions from both our own operations and the key sectors of the economy with which we have business relationships.
We have sought to evaluate and adopt international best practices in sustainability and climate change, with our latest action being our adoption of the TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) in 2020, a global framework that guides companies, financial institutions and governments in identifying, evaluating and disclosing in a standardized manner their impacts and dependencies related to nature. Thanks to those disclosures, concrete actions are taken to address them.
In 2026, after actively participating in the design of this framework, together with various corporations and global financial institutions, Banorte became the first bank in Mexico to adopt and publish its first “Report on Nature and Biodiversity-Related Risks and Opportunities”, following the TNFD’s guidelines.
Additionally, in line with our commitment to sustainability, we have developed and launched sustainable financial products that reduce our carbon footprint, such as Autoestrene Verde.
Seeking to increase our efforts in support of reforestation, we committed to planting and conserving one million trees by 2030. In 2025, we reforested 241,561 trees in Mexico.
Banorte also integrates ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors into its credit-decision process through its Socio-Environmental Risk Management System (SEMS), aligned with international standards, such as the Equator Principles. Since 2015, Environmental and Social Risk Analysis (ESRA) has been formally embedded in Banorte’s Selective Credit Process, ensuring that ESG and climate-related considerations are systematically evaluated in all applicable transactions. Through these mechanisms, Banorte embeds ESG and climate risks into its governance, credit selection and pricing practices, reinforcing its commitment to sustainable and responsible banking.
We believe Banorte is well advanced in managing climate and ESG risks, which are already influencing credit decisions, portfolio steering and capital planning. However, we do not view our current level of integration as final. Our approach is intentionally iterative; as data quality, methodologies and regulatory expectations mature, we will continue to deepen our integration to ensure that ESG and climate risks are treated with the same rigor as the traditional financial risks that influence risk pricing.
In the social field, we continuously work to promote financial inclusion—for example, by supporting women entrepreneurs through our gender-related products such as SME Women. We also ensure that our clients make informed decisions when hiring staff and evaluating financial products, providing financial-education workshops through our various channels and extending community support through initiatives led by Fundación Banorte.
In 2025, our Mujer PYME offering was recognized by CONDUSEF (Comisión Nacional para la Protección y Defensa de los Usuarios de Servicios Financieros) with the Insignia Saasil. This distinction supports the strength of our internal policies and our commitment to innovation, accessibility, financial education and institutional transparency.
One of Mexico’s main challenges is increasing financial inclusion. As one of the region’s largest financial groups, we aim to lead efforts to incorporate initiatives in this area. Financial inclusion is one of Banorte’s central priorities and an essential social metric within our ESG framework, aimed at expanding access to financial products and services for more people every day. Banorte offers an array of personalized and digital products and services that broaden our scope to reach clients who were previously underserved or not served.
Two recognitions, one vision.
When an institution is recognized internationally, its results, consistent performance, vision and ability to execute every day are rewarded.
These recognitions reaffirm that Banorte’s customer-centric strategy, its vision to offer hyper-personalized financial solutions, its agile and timely adaptation to technology and innovation and its commitment to Mexico’s social and environmental future are on the right track.
In short, the recognitions we receive are not isolated events. Behind them are the efforts of the best Mexican banking team; the trust of our clients, investors and collaborators; and a clear vision: Innovation and sustainability are not parallel paths; they are one and the same.