Ualá, founded by Pierpaolo Barbieri in 2017, is a fast-growing fintech company on a mission to revolutionize financial services in Latin America. Starting with a 14-person team and a prepaid card linked to a digital app, Ualá rapidly expanded into a comprehensive financial services platform. By early 2022, it served over 4 million users across Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, offering solutions in payments, credit, wealth management, and business payment processing. Ualá’s hypergrowth was driven by a record-breaking $350 million funding round in 2021, enabling it to enter new markets, secure banking licenses, and acquire financial institutions. However, this rapid expansion surfaced key challenges, including regulatory pressures, leadership development, and the need to balance centralization with local market adaptation. Facing shifting investor demands for profitability over growth, Ualá confronted critical decisions about user acquisition strategies, leadership restructuring, and talent scaling to secure its position in the competitive fintech landscape.
How does economic globalization affect vote choices? Conventional wisdom holds that voters who lose from economic integration support parties that propose expanding the welfare state. However, in the Global South, where the state is frequently weak or under-resourced, people often turn to non-state organizations (such as churches) for protection against economic decline. I argue that, in these contexts, negative globalization shocks increase local communities’ dependence on non-state organizations, thereby making the leaders within such organizations more effective political brokers. To test this argument, I propose a shift-share instrument that measures the exposure of Brazilian local labor markets to exogenous changes in exports. By matching this instrument with electoral and survey data, I provide evidence that declining exports increased the power of evangelical leaders to persuade their congregations to vote against parties that favor welfare-state expansion. My findings help explain and describe the contingencies underlying the political consequences of globalization.
Set in 2024, this case examines how Ingersoll Rand— a global leader in air, liquid, and gas handling technologies—approached broadening employee ownership. The company granted restricted stock units (RSUs) to all employees on their one-year anniversary, reinforcing a culture of ownership. As Ingersoll Rand expanded through acquisitions, CEO Vicente Reynal faced critical questions: How could the company sustain its ownership culture while integrating employees from newly acquired firms? Should it increase stock grants to strengthen engagement and retention? As Reynal prepared for a town hall with employees in Latin America, he reflected on these challenges and the long-term implications of the company’s broad-based ownership model.
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Maria Fernanda Miguel is the Christopher P. Torto Executive Director for the Latin America Research Center (LARC). Her responsibilities include leading research activities for the LATAM region, and providing programmatic support to different areas of HBS including admissions, executive education, and immersion programs. Fernanda is based in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Prior to joining Harvard Business School, Fernanda was a Senior Director and Leader for LATAM Business Development at Merck and senior consultant at McKinsey & Co., serving as global Practice Manager for the Business Technology Office Health Care Practice.
She holds a degree in economics from the Argentine Catholic University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Master of Research from University of Bath.
Fernanda has been very active in non-profit activities, including fund rising at the Fundación Acción Hemato-oncologica – Argentine National Academy of Medicine, and acting as advisor to the Board of Directors of the Hospital Garrahan.