Formation
I grew up in Santa Rosa de Río Jiménez, in the rural lowlands of Guácimo, Limón province on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. My mother taught biology, chemistry and physics in that region — what would now be called STEM education, decades before the term existed. She later served as high school principal and led the construction of several public high schools in the area. From an early age, I understood that institutions are not abstract systems. They are decisions that compound across lives.
By eleven, I was making capital allocation decisions of my own — choosing to repair tires for pay rather than work in the local ornamental plant business after analyzing the trade-off. By fifteen, I was driving trucks in the rural surroundings where I grew up — and later, with a license, the routes that connect the Caribbean lowlands to the rest of the country. At eighteen, I negotiated a contract to provide grounds maintenance services for the administrative compound of a banana plantation in the region — offices, the sports field and staff housing — on a 22-day work cycle, to finance my university education. The discipline required to adhere to that schedule was the first operating system I ever implemented.
In January 2005, my younger brother Cli — a truck driver on Route 32, the same route I had driven — died in a truck accident. I had nearly died twice on similar roads in similar trucks. The line between consequence and luck, in retrospect, was thin. That proximity to irreversible outcomes informs how I think about risk in regulated financial services. Resilience is not a metric. It is the institutional discipline of refusing exposures that look acceptable until they are not.
Years later, that same plantation that I worked for was adjudicated by Banco Nacional de Costa Rica after the operator went bankrupt. The institution where I now lead enterprise operations across 1,700+ professionals and a USD 17 billion balance sheet was, much earlier, the institution that absorbed the consequences of the operation that financed my university. That loop — between the institution and the life it shapes — is the reason I never think about banking as an abstraction.