When Marco Santos began his journey with digital transformation company GFT almost 13 years ago as the Country Manager of Brazil, the market was a completely new frontier for the company—and for Marco, who accepted the challenge of building the business completely from scratch.

Not only did he scale GFT’s internal operations by initiating a phase of rapid growth which took the local team from 80 to 3,414 professionals today, he also introduced the German-based digital consulting giant to a number of banks and financial institutions in the region. Marco led the charge to scale Brazil’s financial portfolio, working with companies on various cloud migration, core system modernization and data transformation initiatives.

Since then, Santos has done the same in a number of other markets—Costa Rica, Mexico, and most recently, the US and Canada as CEO of GFT Americas. In this role, Marco has fostered consistent year-over-year growth in the region, transforming GFT from an almost unknown entity to a trusted brand amongst the largest financial services and manufacturing brands throughout the Americas.

As Santos’s momentum continues to climb he has now taken on his next challenge: the role of co-CEO of GFT alongside Marika Lulay for the rest of 2024, ahead of continuing as sole CEO in 2025. In this new endeavor, Marco is applying what he has learned from scaling GFT’s offerings across the Americas to the entire company—from the top down and across the global markets GFT serves.

Global Banking & Finance Review recently sat down with Santos to learn more about this journey and how he’s successfully transformed a company with virtually no awareness into one competing with household names.

With GFT’s more than 35 years of experience in the banking and financial industry, we also wanted to hear how a company that’s been on the front lines of digital innovation for decades now is approaching a new technological frontier characterized by AI and data-driven experiences.

The same exponential mindset that enabled him to break GFT into entirely new markets across the Americas, says Santos, is what’s now informing the company’s work to lead banks as they enter unknown digital landscapes.

Laying the Foundation for Exponential Growth

AI is at the top of the agenda for many organizations today. They want to use the technology to unlock unrealized operational efficiencies and capitalize on years of historical data to make better-informed decisions—all with the click of a button.

“What banks and financial institutions are encountering now with AI and other new digital capabilities is similar to what I experienced with each new market I entered with GFT. Innovation doesn’t happen overnight. Before I could experience the tangible results of our growth in Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico and the US, there were periods of quiet—sometimes even unnoticeable—work to lay the foundation for this growth,” said Santos.

“Many financial organizations are still in the process of laying the foundation for digital innovation. While it may seem at first that the rest of the industry is moving forward without them, the time is coming for this work to pay off exponentially,” he continued.

GFT is a partner to the world’s largest cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and SalesForce, and it is one of the top three providers of AWS cloud migrations worldwide. The company also partners with multiple cloud-based solution providers in the banking and finance industries, including Thought Machine, Mambu, Oracle, Finastra and Lemonedge. These partnerships enable GFT to provide clients with customized solutions that meet their specific needs.

From this vantage point, the company has been helping banks transform their legacy core systems into modern digital architectures, setting them up to capitalize on new digital technologies, such as AI, as soon as they emerge.

Transforming Alongside The Industry

Santos began studying AI long before it became a mainstream business priority, both at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of São Paulo in Brazil and later in a specialized course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“AI was entirely conceptual back then. We didn’t have the machines or the technological resources to actually make real business change happen,” said Santos. “Part of our role as a digital transformation company is making these tools and resources available to companies.”

Drawing on this background, Santos has been intimately involved with GFT’s continued development of its AI.DA Marketplace, a catalog of ready-to-implement AI and data-based use cases and solutions. Beyond the standard capabilities, Santos also encourages his team to think outside the box and come up with new, client-specific applications for each project and deployment.

“As new AI and data capabilities have emerged, our clients understand the importance of harnessing these technologies and implementing use cases into their existing business workflows,” continued Santos.

Digital transformation provides the foundation businesses require to accurately deploy AI across the enterprise in a way that capitalizes on existing data stores, best practices and historical knowledge. With the proper groundwork in place, Santos believes that the only limit to the possibilities of AI is the human imagination.

“I often talk about the need for an exponential mindset in business. We’re experiencing an exponential process unfolding right before our eyes, and we’ve only scratched the surface,” said Santos.

The Next Frontier of Global Growth

Now, as Marco takes on a new leadership position at GFT, he is looking to continue executing on GFT’s commitment to working hand in hand with clients to bring them the AI-powered solutions to build better businesses. “We have seen the areas of AI, data, and architecture modernizations drive growth across our business,” said Santos. “The deployment of generative AI into the software development cycle has proven to drive efficiency, and I look forward to continuing this momentum.”