Across Latin America, supply-chain finance is moving from the back office and into the centre of corporate strategy. Tariffs, currency controls and social unrest have made continuity of supply, not the cost of financing it, the primary concern for treasury teams operating across the region’s fragmented markets. Tatiane Mendonça, chief financial officer for Brazil and Latin America at Swissport, a Swiss aviation services company offering airport ground handling, lounge hospitality, and cargo handling, and Ricardo Villavicencio, Corporate Treasury Director at Yanbal, a  designer, developer and manufacturer of beauty, cosmetic, and personal care products, described how that shift is affecting their organisations.

A geopolitical problem, not an operational one

Mendonça described the biggest change in Brazil as a move away from a pure efficiency mindset toward one built around resilience.

“Cost and working-capital optimisation, have given way to a greater emphasis on operational continuity, with supply-chain finance functioning less as a tactical tool and more as a strategic means of protecting the business.”—Tatiane Mendonça, chief financial officer for Brazil and Latin America at Swissport

Villavicencio pointed to problems that are as much regional as global: a tariff dispute between Ecuador and Colombia, and social unrest in Bolivia. He described rising volatility in commodity prices and inflation, particularly for critical inputs such as gold and gasoline, as forcing treasury further into a risk-management role than it has traditionally occupied.

Treasury takes the lead

Both experts described a similar path: treasury has moved from sitting alongside procurement to leading supply-chain financing strategy. At Swissport, Mendonça explained how her team secured a five-year credit facility to cover capital-expenditure payments, a deal she said protected the year’s budget and one that treasury, not procurement, designed and led.

“Treasury now also carries responsibility for insurance policies and has become more directly involved in negotiating supplier contracts, working alongside both purchasing and legal departments.”— Ricardo Villavicencio, Corporate Treasury Director at Yanbal

No single playbook

A recurring theme was the difficulty of applying a single strategy across Latin America’s disparate markets. Mendonça said each country carries a distinct risk profile: continuity of supplier service is the dominant concern in Brazil, where Swissport’s airline clients depend on an unbroken chain of ground-handling suppliers, while in Argentina the primary risk is foreign-exchange volatility. She concluded that any workable approach must be hybrid, with strategic direction set globally but adapted locally, aiming to protect operations rather than reduce costs.

Villavicencio described a similar process at Yanbal, where treasury works with the purchasing department to segment suppliers by criticality and risk, including physical and liability risk, as not every contract or purchase order can be reviewed individually.

Supply-chain reaction

The decision to select which suppliers to bring into a supply-chain finance programme, both speakers pointed to a mix of operational criticality and financial vulnerability rather than blanket eligibility. Mendonça said Swissport’s decisions depend on which suppliers can best manage operations if disrupted. Villavicencio said Yanbal’s demand for such financing comes mainly from small and medium-sized suppliers in Peru and Colombia, where local regulation allows them to sell invoices directly to banks or specialised financial institutions for early payment, at a discount.

In banking, Villavicencio said the dominant product available in Peru and Colombia remains “confirming” an early-payment method where funds are initially disbursed by a financial institution and backed by a company’s own credit line, though fintech platforms, usually bank-agnostic, are beginning to compete for the same business.

Mind the technology gap

Both panelists identified fragmentation as the biggest constraint on scaling their programmes. Villavicencio said most supply-chain finance platforms operate on a single-country basis, forcing multinational companies to manage several disconnected systems rather than one. He attributed this partly to the complexity of connecting platforms to tax authorities, clearinghouses and multiple banks at the same time. Mendonça described a related limitation in Brazil, where the local “confirming” product typically locks a company into working with one bank at a time, a structure she said tends to work against suppliers, who might otherwise secure better pricing if several banks competed within the same tool.

Creativity born of crisis

Drawing on her role at Gol Linhas Aéreas, a Brazilian low-cost airline, Mendonça provided a clear example of treasury’s expanded role under stress. Facing common airline sector shocks, the treasury team pursued financing structures beyond conventional receivables, using $2.5 billion in credit-card receivables as collateral.

The company also pledged aircraft spare parts against international bond refinancing and used its intellectual property and frequent-flyer miles to secure more credit lines. She noted that Brazilian carriers must hedge a portion of their fuel exposure, adding to the risk management treasury coordinated. Mendonça noted that in crises, when banks become more cautious just as companies need liquidity most, treasurers must find collateral and structures it would not otherwise consider.

Working capital versus supplier stability

On the tension between extending payment terms and preserving supplier health, the two treasurers described different starting positions shaped by their companies’ liquidity. Villavicencio said Yanbal avoids extending terms altogether, paying on 60-day terms, allowed by the company’s liquidity. Mendonça described a more delicate balance in Brazil, where extending payment terms improves short-term cash flow but can create medium-term operational risk with suppliers, requiring decisions about which suppliers can absorb delayed payment and which cannot.

She made the same distinction when discussing Gol Linhas Aéreas’ approximately 3,000 suppliers: the largest, such as fuel supplier Petrobras, a Brazilian company in the petroleum industry, were treated differently from smaller suppliers who could be included in a confirming programme, because managing all suppliers the same way at that scale was not feasible.

What they would do differently

When asked how they would redesign their supply-chain finance strategies, both speakers emphasised resilience over cost efficiency as the main principle. Mendonça said she would create more flexible structures with multiple sources of liquidity from the start and avoid standardising across Latin American markets, noting that a strategy suitable for Brazil may not work in Argentina, Mexico, or Chile. Villavicencio sees fintech-led, multi-country platforms as the future, suggesting that technology enabling a company to dynamically deploy excess liquidity across its main business units would make smaller suppliers more resilient and better able to access credit when needed.

The two accounts together describe how treasury functions are adapting in real time to an environment where tariffs, currency controls, and social instability are regular features of the operating landscape. The focus on protecting operational continuity is increasingly replacing the priority of reducing costs.