Uruguayan residents (individuals and companies) hold a record figure of 61.862 billion dollars in bank deposits and financial investments abroad, according to the latest official data from the Central Bank of Uruguay (September 2025).
This mountain of money is equivalent to more than 1.5 times the country's GDP. It could finance all public and private investment for several years, build tens of thousands of homes, roads, ports, or industrial plants. However, it remains far from our borders.
The question is simple: if that money belongs to Uruguayans, why do its owners prefer to keep it abroad instead of bringing it in and investing it here?
The answer is also simple, although uncomfortable for those who believe the State can force the destiny of private savings: the money leaves (or stays abroad) because its owners perceive that in Uruguay it is less secure, yields less, faces greater risks of future expropriation and, on top of that, there is no serious and developed capital market where it can be placed efficiently and transparently.
Savings always seek the highest real risk-adjusted return.
No saver leaves hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in an account just out of whim. They do so because, in their subjective calculation, that location offers the best combination of:
- Expected return
- Legal security
- Immediate liquidity
- Protection against unexpected future taxes
- And, crucially: the existence of a deep, liquid, and reliable financial market.
In Uruguay, that last point simply doesn't exist. We do not have a capital market worthy of the name: the Montevideo Stock Exchange moves in a year what Wall Street moves in half an hour.
There are very few listed companies, liquidity is ridiculous, transaction costs are high, and regulation, although improved, is still insufficient to generate mass confidence.
When there is no capital market, money ends up anywhere… including in scams.
In the absence of a competitive local financial ecosystem, Uruguayan savers end up doing two things:
1. They go abroad (U.S., Europe, Singapore) where there are deep markets, thousands of investment options, and rules that do not change every five years.
2. Or, those who want to "stay in Uruguay" or can't/do not wish to move everything abroad, end up falling into informal schemes, "local opportunities" promoted by dubious brokers or directly into pyramid schemes disguised as agricultural investment, "exclusive" trusts, or "foolproof real estate projects."
The most emblematic recent case is precisely Conexión Ganadera: a supposed investment in cattle fattening that attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from Uruguayans (many of them conservative savers who did not want to send everything abroad) and ended up being a classic Ponzi scheme.
