Colombia’s Banks Made $4bn in 2025. Then Petro Taxed Them

Markets

Key Facts

—The headline. Colombia’s thirty banks earned COP 14.2 trillion ($4.07bn) in 2025, a rise of 71.08% on 2024, on operating income of COP 426.4 trillion ($122bn).

—The wider measure. All credit establishments together made COP 17.7 trillion ($5.07bn), against COP 8.7 trillion the year before, a jump of about 103%.

—The engine. The regulator credits investment portfolios and better loan quality. Overdue loans fell 16.4% in real terms and provisioning coverage reached 142%.

—The scale. Financial system assets reached COP 3,545 trillion ($1.02tn), equal to 191% of Colombian gross domestic product.

—The losers. Four of the thirty banks lost money in 2025: Pichincha, AV Villas, Lulo Bank and Davibank.

—The turn. By the first quarter of 2026 the picture reversed. Bancolombia’s profit fell 25.9% year on year, its weakest in five years, after an emergency wealth tax.

Colombia bank profits rose by more than seventy percent last year, as bad loans fell and investment portfolios paid off. The recovery arrived just in time to be taxed.

Figures compiled from the Superintendencia Financiera, Colombia’s banking regulator, show the country’s thirty banks earned just over fourteen trillion pesos in 2025. In dollars that is a little above four billion, and it represents a rise of some seventy-one percent on the previous year.

Operating income grew far more modestly, up about five and a half percent to roughly four hundred and twenty-six trillion pesos. The gap between a five percent revenue rise and a seventy percent profit rise is the whole story of Colombian banking last year.

One-stop reference

Company Intelligence

Every listed company in Latin America — financials, ownership and structure for 1,450+ companies across 26 exchanges, in one place.

Browse the directory →

What actually drove Colombia bank profits

Banks did not sell much more. They simply stopped losing so much money on loans that were not being repaid.

In its year-end summary, the regulator attributes the improvement to the favourable performance of investment portfolios and to better loan quality as borrowers kept up with payments. Overdue loans fell by more than sixteen percent in real terms over the year.

Coverage, the cushion of provisions banks hold against loans that may sour, strengthened to 142%. Colombian lenders now set aside a little over one and two-fifths pesos for every peso of overdue credit.

When a bank provisions less, the money it does not set aside drops straight to the bottom line. That is how a modest revenue year becomes a spectacular profit year, and it is a one-off arithmetic effect rather than a new engine of growth.

How big are Colombia bank profits in context?

Broaden the lens beyond the thirty banks and the recovery looks even sharper. Credit establishments as a group, which includes financial corporations and cooperatives, earned seventeen point seven trillion pesos against eight point seven trillion the year before.

That is a rise of roughly one hundred and three percent, on our own arithmetic, and it more than doubles the prior year. The whole financial system earned close to twenty-eight trillion pesos, or about one point seven percent of the value of its assets.

Those assets are enormous relative to the country. At around three thousand five hundred trillion pesos, roughly one trillion dollars, they equal nearly twice Colombian annual economic output.

Not everyone shared in the recovery. Four banks finished the year in the red: Pichincha, AV Villas, Lulo Bank and Davibank, while the financing companies as a category lost money outright.

The ranking by operating income was led by Bancolombia, BBVA Colombia, Davivienda, Banco de Occidente and Banco de Bogotá. On profit, GNB Sudameris displaced Davivienda from second place.

Its president attributed that to a heavy weighting in payroll-deduction lending, where repayments come straight out of a borrower’s salary. It is the safest consumer credit in Colombia, and in a year defined by falling defaults, safety paid.

The loan book itself grew to about seven hundred and sixty trillion pesos, with real expansion across every category. Savers received more than one hundred trillion pesos in returns over the twelve months, according to the regulator.

The recovery met a tax

Here is the part that a headline number cannot carry. The year that produced these profits ended in December, and by February the government had declared an economic emergency and imposed a wealth tax on companies.

Financial institutions were charged at one point six percent, more than three times the rate applied to most industries. The levy is not deductible against income tax, which makes it a pure addition to an already heavy burden.

The effect showed up immediately. This publication reported in May that Bancolombia, the country’s largest lender, posted a first-quarter profit nearly twenty-six percent lower than a year earlier and its weakest in five years.

Both facts are true at once, and reconciling them matters. A sector that had just doubled its earnings saw its largest bank, within a single quarter, report its weakest profit in five years.

Why do the 2025 and 2026 numbers point opposite ways?

They measure different periods and different forces. The 2025 figures capture a full year of falling provisions and strong investment returns, before the emergency decree existed.

The first quarter of 2026 captures the tax landing on balance sheets that were, on the underlying business, still healthy. Loans kept growing and defaults kept falling; only the tax line changed.

What should a foreign investor watch next?

Whether the wealth tax survives judicial review, and whether the incoming government keeps it. Colombia has a habit of making emergency levies permanent, and the wealth tax itself began as a one-off in 2019.

The banks’ underlying credit cycle has turned in their favour. Whether shareholders ever see the benefit is now a political question rather than a financial one.