Pedro Moreira Salles
Pedro Moreira Salles is a Brazilian banker who serves as co-chairman of Itaú Unibanco, the largest private-sector bank in Latin America. He led Unibanco as its chief executive and directed its merger with Banco Itaú in 2008, the transaction that created the present institution, and subsequently served as chairman of the combined bank.
He is also chairman of Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração, a private Brazilian company that supplies the great majority of the world's niobium, and is closely associated with the Instituto Moreira Salles, the cultural foundation established by his family.
Early life and education
Moreira Salles was born on 20 October 1959 in Rio de Janeiro. He is a son of Walther Moreira Salles, a banker who founded what became Unibanco and who twice served as Brazilian ambassador to the United States and as finance minister.
His brothers include the film director Walter Salles, whose work includes Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries and who won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film for I'm Still Here in 2025, and the documentary maker and writer João Moreira Salles.
He studied economics and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and took a master's degree in international relations at Yale University.
Career
Unibanco
Moreira Salles joined Unibanco in 1989 and held a succession of positions before becoming chief executive in 2004.
Unibanco was among the largest private Brazilian banks and had been built by his father from a family business in Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais. Under his leadership it expanded in retail banking, insurance and consumer credit, in a period during which the Brazilian banking system was consolidating rapidly following the stabilisation of the currency under the Plano Real in 1994 and the restructuring of the sector that followed.
The Itaú Unibanco merger
In November 2008, in the weeks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Unibanco and Banco Itaú announced their merger. The combined institution, Itaú Unibanco, became the largest bank in Latin America and among the twenty largest in the world by market capitalisation at the time.
The timing was deliberate. Moreira Salles and Roberto Setubal, Itaú's chief executive, had discussed a combination over a long period and concluded during the crisis that a larger institution would be better placed both to withstand the disruption and to compete against the state-owned banks and the international entrants operating in Brazil. The announcement was made without leaks, which was itself notable for a transaction of that size.
The governance arrangement was unusual and has proved durable. The two controlling families, Moreira Salles and Setubal, together with the Villela family associated with Itaú, hold their interests through a joint holding company, and the chairmanship has alternated between Moreira Salles and Setubal, with the two subsequently serving as co-chairmen. Professional management has run the bank throughout, with the families exercising control at board level rather than operationally.
Moreira Salles served as chairman of the board from 2017, alternating with Setubal under the agreed arrangement.
Itaú Unibanco
The bank Moreira Salles co-chairs is among the most profitable large banks in the world, consistently reporting returns on equity well above those of European and American institutions of comparable size.
The reasons lie principally in the structure of Brazilian banking. The sector is highly concentrated, with a small number of large private and state-owned institutions holding the great majority of deposits and credit. Interest rate spreads in Brazil, the difference between what banks pay for funds and what they charge borrowers, have historically been among the widest in the world, reflecting high policy rates, high reserve requirements, substantial credit risk, high taxation of financial intermediation and, critics argue, limited competition.
That environment has come under pressure. The central bank introduced Pix, an instant payment system, in November 2020, which was adopted with extraordinary speed and which removed a substantial volume of fee revenue from cards and transfers across the sector. Digital banks, principally Nubank, founded in 2013, have acquired tens of millions of customers by offering accounts and credit cards without fees, and have obliged the established banks to respond. Open banking regulation has made it easier for customers to move.
Itaú Unibanco's response has been substantial investment in digital services, the development of its own digital platform, and the reduction of its branch network, alongside an argument made publicly by its leadership that scale, capital and a full product range remain advantages that a digital competitor cannot replicate quickly.
CBMM
Moreira Salles is chairman of Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração, a company controlled by his family which mines and processes niobium at Araxá in Minas Gerais.
The business is strategically unusual. Niobium is used principally as an alloying element in high-strength low-alloy steel, where very small quantities produce substantial improvements in strength and weight, and Brazil holds the overwhelming majority of the world's economically recoverable reserves. CBMM supplies the great majority of world demand, a position of concentration with few equivalents in any commodity, and the company has invested considerably in developing new applications, including in battery materials for rapid-charging cells.
Cultural activity
The Instituto Moreira Salles, established in 1990 and funded by the family, is among the most significant private cultural institutions in Brazil. It holds very large collections of Brazilian photography, music, literary archives and works on paper, operates cultural centres in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Poços de Caldas, and publishes the literary magazine Serrote and the journalism review piauí.
The last of these is notable: piauí, founded in 2006, is a long-form magazine modelled loosely on the American tradition of narrative journalism, and it has published extensive investigative reporting including on subjects touching the Brazilian financial sector. That it is funded by a family that controls the largest private bank in the country has been remarked upon and has not evidently constrained its reporting.
Assessment
Moreira Salles is a banker whose principal achievement was a merger and whose subsequent role has been that of a controlling shareholder rather than a manager.
The 2008 transaction is judged favourably. Combining two large banks is difficult in ordinary conditions and the two were combined in the middle of a global financial crisis, with the integration completed without the failures that have attended comparable mergers elsewhere. The governance arrangement agreed between the families, with alternating chairmanship and professional management, has held for more than fifteen years, which is considerably longer than most such arrangements survive.
The criticisms are of the sector rather than of him. Brazilian banking has been extremely profitable for its owners and expensive for its customers, and the concentration that made Itaú Unibanco possible is the same concentration that permitted the spreads which generated the returns. The arrival of Pix and of digital competitors has begun to change that, and the central bank's willingness to build a public payment system that removed a large revenue stream from private banks was a deliberate policy choice with few parallels elsewhere.
The family's cultural activity is on a scale unusual in Brazilian business and is conducted at arm's length from the commercial interests, which is the more remarkable part of it.