An X-ray of Colombia's financial sector, June 2026

Two hundred and fifty-four institutions file financial statements with Colombia’s Superintendencia Financiera. Between them they hold 1,732 trillion pesos in assets as of June 2026: close to 90% of what the country’s 29,312 commercial companies add up to, held by 0.9% as many entities.

A note on scale: Colombian financial reporting uses the long scale, where billón means a million millions. Throughout this article “trillion” means 10¹², which is what a Colombian reader sees as billón.

The aggregate hides the interesting part. Of the 254, 41 closed the half-year at a loss. And they are not the ones you would look for first.

Half the sector sits in five institutions

The five largest hold 51.3% of assets and the ten largest 65.5%. Bancolombia alone is 16.7%.

One warning before reading that figure. The second entity on the list is not a bank: it is the central counterparty clearing house (Cámara de Riesgo Central de Contraparte), with 182 trillion pesos and a category of its own containing a single entity. Its assets are mostly third-party collateral it administers as central counterparty to market operations — not own funds exposed to risk. Excluding it, the sector drops to 1,550 trillion and top-5 concentration lands at 51.2%: practically the same, except now they are five banks.

Within banking, concentration is stronger still: the five largest banks hold 70.9% of banking assets.

The banks are not the problem

This is the finding that runs against intuition.

The three banks in the red are Banco Pichincha (−74 billion pesos), Banco Coomeva (−20 billion) and Lulo Bank (−15 billion). Together they do not reach 110 billion pesos in losses, against 9.07 trillion in earnings from the rest.

Consumer finance companies are the other face. Half closed the half-year at a loss and the type, added up, closes in the red. These are the institutions that lend to consumers without the deposit base a bank has: they fund themselves more expensively, lend to the most exposed segment, and have nothing to dilute a deterioration in the loan book with.

The same story, smaller, shows up in the specialised electronic deposit and payment companies: 9 institutions, a third at a loss, negative aggregate return.

The most profitable business has the smallest balance sheet

The 27 trust companies (sociedades fiduciarias) hold 4.7 trillion pesos of their own assets — 0.3% of the sector — and are the type with the best return among all those with at least four institutions: 14.4% on equity. Only one of the 27 closed at a loss.

The reason is structural. A trust company administers segregated estates that never enter its own balance sheet. It charges a fee for managing money that is not its own, so it barely needs capital to operate. The figure carries a useful lesson for anyone assessing the sector: profitability and balance-sheet size do not travel together.

Where the money comes from

On the liability side, the sector funds itself with deposits: 1,040 trillion pesos, 60% of total assets. On the asset side, the loan book is 797 trillion, or 46%.

The ratio between the two — loans over deposits, 77% — says that for every 100 pesos the public deposits, the system lends out 77. The rest sits in investments, reserve requirements and liquidity.

In commercial banking the proportion is higher: 718 trillion in loans against 895 trillion in deposits, with loans making up 64% of bank assets. A bank, unlike the rest of the sector, is above all a loan portfolio.

Leverage is not a defect

Colombia’s financial sector runs at 87.3% leverage: for every 100 pesos of assets, 87 are other people’s money and 13 are equity. Next to the average commercial company (46%) that looks alarming, and it is not. It is precisely how a bank operates. It takes deposits from the public and lends them out. If its liabilities were not the bulk of its balance sheet, it would not be doing its job.

That is also why it carries the strictest supervisory regime of the three that exist in Colombia, and why any analysis that adds the three universes together ends up describing banking and nothing else. That contrast is laid out in the comparison of the three regulators.

How it was built

The source is the Catálogo Único de Información Financiera (CUIF) by currency, cut-off 30 June 2026, cross-referenced against the directory of supervised institutions. Four criteria worth knowing if you plan to replicate it:

• Take the “Total” currency and discard the local- and foreign-currency rows; otherwise every balance is counted twice.
• Profit for the period lives in account 590000, not in the difference between revenue and expenses. In the CUIF, accounts 400000 and 500000 come before closing entries and are identical by construction: subtracting them yields zero. Of the 254 institutions, 242 have revenue and expenses exactly equal.
• The join key is institution type + code, never the code alone. There is a code “1” among banks and another “1” among brokerage firms: joining on code alone matched 54 of 254 institutions; with the full key, 254 of 254.
• Names appear as the institution reports them, in capitals and without accents, so they match the official registry and the financial institution search tool.

All information is public and pertains to legal entities. Neither the dashboard nor the attached file includes contact details for any institution.