Banco de Crédito del Perú said on 27 August 2026 that its Miami operation now runs as a bank branch, after the switch took legal effect in July 2026. The move gives the Peruvian banking giant a broader foothold inside the U.S. financial system, where the rules still decide who gets to take deposits, who gets to lend, and who gets locked out.
Who Gets the License
The BCP Miami branch replaced the bank’s Coral Gables agency, which Florida licensed in 2002, and the office has worked there since Florida authorized it to transact business on 3 September 2002. The Federal Reserve Board cleared the state-licensed branch on 24 April 2026. The Florida Office of Financial Regulation issues the state licence, and that office supervised the old agency too, alongside the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Until July, the office was an agency, a narrower licence than a branch. Under United States law, an agency may lend money, pay checks and hold credit balances for clients, but it may not accept deposits from citizens or residents of the United States. A branch, under the same statute, is an office at which deposits are received. A representative office is narrower still and books no business at all.
That legal distinction matters. It decides who can touch money and who can’t. It also decides which institutions get to widen their reach while everyone else stays boxed into the categories the regulators hand out.
Mark Talbot, chief executive of BCP Miami, said the change lets the bank serve more companies. He set a target of roughly 100 new corporate clients by 2027. Credicorp’s annual report says the branch may accept wholesale deposits from US sources for the first time. The branch is not insured, and since December 1991 no foreign bank has been able to open a new insured retail branch. To hold small retail accounts, a foreign bank must build or buy an insured US subsidiary. Anything below the insured ceiling of US$250,000 stays off limits to a branch.
What the Branch Can Do
The published product list covers corporate accounts in dollars and euros, payments, treasury products and company lending. BCP has published no staffing number for the BCP Miami branch, and its statement gave no assets figure or target balance sheet. The bank is talking about expansion, but not about how many workers will carry it out or what scale the operation will actually reach.
BCP ranks first among Peru’s commercial banks by assets, loans and deposits, according to the Superintendencia de Banca, Seguros y AFP, Peru’s banking and pensions regulator. The bank holds close to 29% of Peruvian bank loans and 33% of deposits. In wholesale banking alone its loan share reaches 37.2%. On 30 June 2026, BCP on a stand-alone basis held S/218.3 billion (US$65.2 billion) in assets. Its parent Credicorp reported S/282.8 billion (US$84.5 billion) on the same date. Both conversions use the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú rate of S/3.348 per dollar on 27 August 2026. BCP alone made up 75.6% of Credicorp’s assets at the end of 2025.
Credicorp is registered in Bermuda and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BAP. It owns 97.74% of BCP together with its subsidiary Grupo Crédito. Coral Gables is not Credicorp’s only address in the United States. Credicorp Capital USA sits in Miami, with sister firms in Miami and Coral Gables. The Federal Reserve renewed its clearances for those securities units on 26 February 2026. They do advisory work and riskless principal trades, and they take no deposits.
The Offshore Chain
Offshore, the group runs ASB Bank Corp, which absorbed Atlantic Security Bank of the Cayman Islands in 2021. The surviving company is Panamanian and is supervised in Panama. BCP has also run a branch in Panama for years, well before the Florida change. The Miami office joins an existing chain of offshore and onshore units. The structure stretches across jurisdictions, each one handing out its own permissions while the money keeps moving.
Foreign banks have run Florida offices for decades, and the Federal Reserve counts them every quarter. On 31 March 2026, the state held 12 branches or agencies of foreign banks. Nine of those 12 belonged to Latin American banks. They came from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador and Peru, and all were uninsured. The biggest of the 12 was Banco de Sabadell of Spain, with US$11.5 billion in assets. Itaú Unibanco of Brazil followed at US$6.9 billion, then Chile’s Banco de Crédito e Inversiones. BCP’s Coral Gables agency held US$635 million on that date.
Peruvian companies bank heavily in dollars, and that is the demand this licence targets. Dollar loans were 26.1% of lending by Peru’s main private lenders at the end of 2025. Deposits are more dollarised still, at 35.28% of the commercial banking system in December 2025. Total bank deposits then stood at S/394.5 billion (US$117.8 billion).
A second United States move is still waiting. In December 2025, BCP agreed to buy Helm Bank USA of Miami for US$180 million. Helm Bank carries Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation cover and held US$1.2 billion in assets on 30 June 2026. Credicorp filed for Federal Reserve clearance in May 2026, and none had appeared by late August. If cleared, that purchase would give the group the insured retail arm a branch cannot be. Until then, the Coral Gables office remains a wholesale house for companies.