Ángela Hurtado, managing director of J.P. Morgan in Colombia, appears on Forbes Colombia’s 2026 list of the country’s 100 most powerful women, and the recognition arrives as she steps up her public commentary on the investment climate that has cost Colombia more than US$5,700 million in foreign capital since the 2022 peak, a figure that places the country’s credibility with global investors at the center of the 2027 presidential debate.
Her position at J.P. Morgan gives that commentary specific institutional weight: she leads the bank’s Colombian operation at a moment when the country’s foreign direct investment (FDI) has fallen for three consecutive years, and her diagnosis of why that happened matches no single government’s preferred explanation.
From Tunja to the top of Colombian banking
Hurtado grew up in Tunja, Boyacá, and moved to Bogotá to study Finance, Government, and International Relations at the Universidad Externado de Colombia, finishing her degree with an emphasis in financial derivatives and completing her professional internship at the Ministerio de Hacienda’s public credit division, where she encountered sovereign debt management and capital markets at their most technical. She then spent six years at Banco de Bogotá, eventually leading its money desk (the unit that manages the bank’s short-term liquidity and fixed-income trades), before joining J.P. Morgan in 2006 when the bank began operating under a local financial corporation license, a structure that gave it a Colombian legal presence but limited its retail banking capacity.
That limit changed in December 2020, when the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia approved J.P. Morgan’s conversion from a financial corporation to a full banking establishment under Resolution 1091, giving the institution the regulatory standing to expand its operations; it also gave Hurtado a broader mandate, and she has held the managing director role ever since. The bank closed 2025 with profits of US$35.8 million in Colombia and earned US$6.5 million in just the first two months of 2026, according to the Superintendencia Financiera, numbers that read as a vote of institutional confidence in the market even as the broader FDI picture deteriorates.
Three causes behind Colombia’s investment retreat
That investor confidence gap becomes concrete in Banco de la República data: Colombia’s FDI peaked at US$17,182 million in 2022, fell to US$16,796 million in 2023, dropped to US$13,684 million in 2024, and contracted again to US$11,469 million in 2025, a 16.2% annual decline that left the country receiving roughly US$5,700 million less in productive capital than it did three years earlier, well below the US$13,989 million Colombia attracted before the pandemic in 2019.
Hurtado identifies three causes with precision: regulatory instability in the infrastructure sector, actions that have weakened institutional credibility, and a structural fiscal deficit that reduces the government’s capacity to offer long-term investment guarantees; she also points to a deceleration in domestic private investment as a compounding factor, meaning the shortfall is not purely a foreign-capital problem but a broader signal about the business environment. Andrés Restrepo, general manager of the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia and markets manager at Nuam, frames the role of institutions like J.P. Morgan in exactly this context, arguing that “the participation of global actors is essential to deepen liquidity, broaden the base of issuers and investors, and raise standards” in Colombia’s capital markets.
What Hurtado expects from the next government
Without endorsing any specific presidential candidate, Hurtado states that whoever wins the May 2026 election must restore investor confidence, keep discipline in public finances, and return operational guarantees to the private sector without abandoning the social investment agenda, a combination that describes a narrow political path between the market-focused and redistribution-focused poles that have defined Colombia’s recent electoral cycles.
Colombia enters the final stretch of the 2026 campaign with an investor confidence deficit that three years of declining FDI have made quantifiable, and Hurtado’s diagnosis, coming from the managing director of one of the world’s largest banks with two decades of direct exposure to the Colombian market, carries the kind of institutional weight that campaign platforms rarely generate on their own.