Biography

Dr. Alberto Ortiz Bolaños is a financial economist with more than 15 years of experience at the intersection of economic policy, financial regulation, and strategic advisory. He is currently General Director of Bank and Finance, a consulting and knowledge platform that supports finance ministries, central banks, financial regulators, development banks, and private institutions in designing strategies, strengthening resilience, and fostering sustainable financial development.

Since 2021, Dr. Ortiz has led Bank and Finance’s deep-dive series on critical global topics—including digital currencies, climate change and financial risks, demographic change, sovereign debt, financial regulation, open finance, infrastructure finance, and the future of payments—producing reports, frameworks, and knowledge tools for institutional investors, policymakers, and regulators worldwide. He also advises the Cambodia Australia Partnership for Resilient Economic Development (CAPRED), where he led the drafting of Cambodia’s Law on Infrastructure Debt Securities (approved in 2025) and contributed to the design of a feasibility study and roadmap for ESG bond issuance.

Since 2021 he has advised the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Cambodian Ministry of Economy and Finance and the National Bank of Cambodia on the development of the country’s government bond market, including the first sovereign issuances in 2022–2023, and in designing an economic growth strategy for Vision 2050. He also advised the Ministry of Planning of Cambodia in preparing the 2023 Voluntary National Review submitted to the UN High-Level Political Forum. In 2022–2023, he collaborated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on the design of national development banks for agricultural finance, and with the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on a monograph analyzing how corruption affects public finances in the banking, oil, and mining sectors globally.

From 2018 to 2021, Dr. Ortiz served as Director General of Instituto del Fondo Nacional para el Consumo de los Trabajadores (FONACOT), Mexico’s largest payroll credit institution. Under his leadership, FONACOT disbursed nearly 3 million payroll loans worth MXN 54 billion, reduced average credit costs by 36%, lowered operating costs by 29%, and generated an 86% increase in profits, while expanding the credit portfolio by 25% and net worth by 57%. He also spearheaded a COVID-19 relief program that granted four-month payment deferrals to over 570,000 workers, providing MXN 938 million in support.

Previously, he was Manager of Research at the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA), where he coordinated multinational research networks with more than 50 central banks across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. He developed policy-oriented research on monetary policy, financial stability, and macro-financial linkages, and launched CEMLA’s research webinar series featuring leading economists such as Nobel laureates Jean Tirole, Christopher Sims, and Michael Woodford. Earlier, he served as Deputy Manager of Monetary Research at CEMLA, Assistant Professor at Oberlin College, Professor at EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Teaching Fellow at Harvard University.

Dr. Ortiz has published widely on monetary and financial economics, editing major volumes such as Monetary Policy and Financial Stability in Latin America (CEMLA, 2018) and International Spillovers of Monetary Policy (Banco de España & CEMLA, 2017). His academic research appears in leading journals including the Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and the South African Journal of Economics. His current research focuses on macro-financial linkages, the role of financial conditions in monetary policy, the interaction between fiscal and monetary policies, and the impact of corruption on public finances and state-owned enterprises.

A frequent speaker at international conferences and central banking forums, he has presented his work at the World Bank, IMF, Bank for International Settlements, Bank of England, Banco de España, Banco Central do Brasil, Banco de México, and universities including Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Ortiz holds a Ph.D. in Economics (2009) and an M.A. in Political Economy (2005) from Boston University, and a B.A. in Economics from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico.