The Spanish and almost world leader in currency exchange at airports has been closely linked since its inception to those capricious lines on the ground that delimit the territory, called borders. Global Exchange was born in 1996, in the town of Fuentes de Oñoro, the busiest border point, at least at that time, between Spain and Portugal, and since then its activity has always been linked to these places of passage and exchange.
A border is an administrative barrier and also an economic opportunity. And that's what they saw at least in the Alanís family, who thought of changing pesetas and escudos when the banks were closed, in the afternoon or during the weekend. “Twelve million people passed through our town a year,” recalls Isidoro Alanís, president and founder of Global Exchange.
However, the borders are more alive than it seems. With the arrival of the euro, the business collapsed and necessity had to be made a virtue. “We were left without a market overnight,” explains Alanís. The group decided to internationalize and opt for another type of border crossing, that of airports, with Argentina, Costa Rica and Uruguay as the first destinations. It was the beginning of a new adventure not without difficulties. The biggest came in 2012, the year in which Cristina Fernández de Kirchner expropriated YPF from Repsol and in the process decided to put an end to the currency exchange business at airports. The setback forced the company to look for new destinations.
The result of this journey in search of places to exchange one currency for another is that it is “the most international of all the companies in Salamanca,” maintains its president. The group has a presence in 24 countries, serves 12 million customers and employs around 2,500 people, and yet it continues to make its decisions on the banks of the Tormes.
Then there are the other borders, the temporal ones, which are the ones that mark the events. The worst was the pandemic, when the company was forced to close all its establishments due to the collapse of tourism and activity. It was at that moment when he turned to Sepi's support fund for strategic companies to obtain aid of 45 million euros, which he has already returned in full.
Alanís assures that the company emerged “strengthened” from the covid and proof of this is that in fiscal year 2022, the last one for which accounts are available, it managed to triple the gross operating profit (ebitda) obtained in 2019.
One of the keys to the recovery was the explosive return of tourism and its implementation in the main European airports. Of the ten largest on the continent, it operates in five, including Istanbul and Charles de Gaulle in Paris.
The group's forecast is that this year a new revenue record will be broken, with nearly 300 million euros. Growth will continue to be mostly organic, says its president, and at the moment there are no plans to open the capital to new partners or go public. They are possible moves “as long as the family retains the majority of the capital,” he says.
After the pandemic, the big unknown now is the future of cash, the raw material of Global Exchange's business. “There is no doubt that it is a threat caused by the entities,” says Alanís. He argues that cash gives “total freedom to control spending” and says he is convinced that “it has many years left.” He compares it to oil: “For as long as I can remember, I have heard that it is going to end, and not only is it not like that, but it is consumed more than ever.”
