Liba Saiovici never went back to live in Venezuela after leaving to attend graduate school in the U.S., but she stayed focused on the region through a career managing Latin American transaction services at Bank of America.
Honored as one of PaymentsSource’s Most Influential Women in Payments for 2021, Saiovici has spent 23 years at BofA serving global corporations and banks, navigating the web of laws pertaining to payments in Latin America.
“The region has a lot of complexity around local compliance, and each product we introduce needs to address the client’s needs while adhering to each country’s unique regulations,” Saiovici said.
Her family history of relatives emigrating and struggling to survive and make ends meet played no small role in helping Saiovici develop fluency in the differences and challenges different cultures face.
“My father is a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family in World War II and my mother emigrated three times to flee dictatorships — in Spain, Cuba and Venezuela,” Saiovici said.
Saiovici’s husband hails from Costa Rica, further extending her connections in the Latin American region from a base in Miami.
“I’m grateful that my multicultural background is valued at the bank, and I’ve been able to use that personal experience to enhance results for our company and clients with my involvement in many diversity and inclusion initiatives,” she said.
Latin America is rapidly modernizing its payments technology, including building real-time payments. Today there are more than 50 instant payment schemes around the world, and Brazil's scheme, which went live in November 2020, already has seen adoption levels surpass the volume for traditional wire payments, Saiovici said.
The pandemic intensified the need for digitization in Latin American payments, demonstrating critical benefits including enhanced safety, speed and convenience, she said.
“I’ve seen a renewed interest in digitizing payments and treasury functions. What many clients once viewed as optional is increasingly considered essential, with other benefits. And it’s increased transparency, which is helping to fight money laundering."
The pandemic also spotlighted the Latin American landscape’s exposure to fraud and cybercrime.
“Unfortunately, many companies lacked business contingency plans covering remote working, which had a direct impact on their ability to make and approve payments. It was a hard lesson for these companies to learn. We conducted a series of educational sessions soon after the global lockdowns took effect and we saw implementations skyrocket as a result,” Saiovici said.
From an organizational perspective, the pandemic leveled the playing field for employees across departments, Saiovici said.
“The office walls and doors have gone away. We’ve found new ways to connect and today I feel that I know my team and my peers better than before,” she said.
These changes enhanced Saiovici’s passion to help women succeed in the workplace, where she mentors women at various levels of the organization and participates in local networking organizations in Miami. She also serves on the financial institutions board of the Florida International Bankers Association.
“My career path was also shaped by my life in Venezuela, where there weren’t many opportunities for young women and where security was a big issue, and I love helping other women succeed,” she said.
Though Saiovici has spent more than two decades at one bank, her work has been extremely varied. She played a key role in enhancing cash-management processes in Brazil and Mexico and helped establish the infrastructure extending Merrill Lynch’s commercial banking operations to Latin America after BofA bought the company.
“Never stop learning. After years of thinking I always had to know the answers, I’ve come to realize what’s most important is being willing to learn. Doing so will free you up to new opportunities, broaden your thinking and allow you to see openings or patterns you didn’t see before,” she said.
