Luisa Montes Contreras, Vice President and Director of Institutional Development 

Luisa Montes Contreras cofounded Ecobanca, and she now serves as the organization’s Director of Institutional Development. Luisa worked as Director of Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the Undersecretariat of Environmental Promotion and Regulation within SEMARNAT, the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources, in the past administration. Before that, she was Director of the Department of Economic and Social Analysis. She has more than ten years of experience in the financial sector, which included working at Banamex in the areas of economic analysis and financial engineering. 

Luisa Montes was part of the United Nations’ Expert Group on the Financing of Sustainable Development. She participated in the design of a payment program that was launched as part of the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary redesign, and she actively participated in the negotiations with the ejidatarios(land reform farmers) from the State of Mexico. 

Luisa Montes has twice participated in the International Negotiation Program for Sustainable Development, which is hosted each year by the Sustainability Challenge Foundation at the Zeist Foundation in the Netherlands. She is a member of the Leadership Network for Sustainable Development at LEAD International (Sixth Cohort). 

Luisa Montes studied economics at the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico (ITAM). She holds a master’s degree in Public Policy from ITAM and another master’s in environmental economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was an environmental economics professor at ITAM, where she also consulted on various environmental services diploma courses.