Brokers Are Staffing LATAM — What Operators Should Read

TL;DR: XS.com pulled Mariana Higa from Vantage to run Latin America marketing — campaigns, sponsorships, trade shows, media. It’s the second LATAM-specific hire at the broker since July. Meanwhile Tickmill, ATFX, and others are doing the same. The regional arms race for retail forex acquisition in Latin America is no longer a future trend — it’s current hiring policy.

The Hire in Detail

Mariana Higa joins XS.com as regional marketing director for Latin America, effective October 2026. She comes directly from Vantage, where she spent two years operating remotely from Lima — first as a growth team lead, then as regional manager from March 2026. Before Vantage, she logged seven months at HFM in account management and business development, and nearly two years at Exness as a retail account manager starting August 2022. XS.com puts her total professional experience at over ten years across the industry.

Her remit at XS.com covers the full regional marketing stack: paid campaigns, trade show sponsorships, industry events, marketing assets, and media relationships. She will coordinate directly with sales and compliance to keep campaigns inside the local regulatory boundaries of each country — a practical requirement in a region where CFD advertising rules vary significantly between Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.

This is the second LATAM hire XS.com has made since July 2026, when it brought on Maria Pesca Santos — formerly of Tradeview Markets — as regional director. Pesca Santos is based in Colombia. Together, the two hires give XS.com a two-person regional leadership layer dedicated entirely to Latin America.

XS.com’s 2026 Hiring Pattern

The LATAM appointments are part of a broader build-out at XS.com. The broker, founded in Australia in 2010, now holds eight regulatory approvals — including entities in Australia, Cyprus, South Africa, and a UAE license added in October 2025. Its hiring acceleration through 2026 has followed a clear logic: fill regional gaps with people who already have operator-side experience at direct competitors.

In March 2026, XS.com named Simon-Peter Massabni, a former Exness manager, as head of retail sales. In June, Omar Alaa — the third consecutive Exness alumnus hired by XS.com — became marketing director for the Middle East and North Africa. In July, former Alpari executive Emily Aghajanyan took charge of emerging markets growth. Now Higa, poached from Vantage, closes out the LATAM gap.

The pattern is deliberate: hire from competitors who already worked the exact geography you want to own. This reduces ramp time on local market knowledge, affiliate networks, and event relationships — all of which take years to build from scratch.

XS.com also sponsored at least four trade shows in Peru, Colombia, and Mexico in 2026, according to its own announcements. Those sponsorship relationships now sit under Higa’s ownership.

Rivals Are Running the Same Play

XS.com is not alone. The Latin America staffing trend across retail forex brokers is consistent enough to read as industry-wide strategy rather than individual broker ambition.

Tickmill promoted Brunno Huertas to LATAM regional manager in October 2025, drawing on his prior sales leadership at IronFX in the region. ATFX took a marketing-to-operations route: it elevated Ergin Erdemir to head of LATAM in 2024 after he had spent years expanding its European and Latin American business from the UK marketing side.

The common thread across all three brokers is promotion or recruitment of people who have direct, on-the-ground familiarity with the region’s retail trading audience — not international executives who treat LATAM as a single market. The region is not a monolith. Brazil runs on Portuguese, trades on different risk tolerance, and has its own regulatory framework. Mexico’s retail base behaves differently from Peru’s. Colombia has its own compliance posture. Any broker running a one-size campaign across all five major LATAM markets is leaving conversion on the table.

For operators managing forex acquisition programs in the region, the hire signals that local-language, country-specific creative is no longer optional — it’s table stakes against brokers who now have dedicated regional managers enforcing that standard.

What This Means for Forex Operators

The implications here go beyond XS.com’s org chart. When multiple brokers simultaneously staff up dedicated regional marketing leadership for the same geography, CPAs in that geography move. More broker spend chasing the same retail pool compresses margins for everyone running on volume-based affiliate structures, and raises the creative bar for paid acquisition.

For brokers and prop firms who have not yet built a LATAM-specific acquisition layer, the window to enter the region at lower competitive cost is narrowing fast. The brokers already operating with dedicated regional managers will set the benchmarks for cost-per-lead and cost-per-funded-account that everyone else will have to beat.

The compliance angle is equally important. Higa’s role explicitly includes working with legal and compliance teams to ensure campaigns meet local regulatory standards. Brokers that run geographically generic campaigns without local compliance review face both regulatory risk and conversion drag — ads that feel foreign or make claims not permissible in a specific country underperform regardless of targeting quality. If your paid media operations are running a single creative set across all of Latin America, you are running a compliance risk and a performance problem simultaneously.

Country-level audience segmentation — different creatives, different offers, different compliance-checked messaging for Brazil versus Mexico versus Colombia — is now the operational standard that regional directors like Higa are paid to enforce. Operators without that infrastructure should treat the competitive gap as urgent.

It also matters where talent gets recruited from. Every broker in this article pulled its LATAM hire from a direct competitor. That means the knowledge of your campaigns, your affiliate structure, your event relationships, and your regional team’s weaknesses travels with the hire. If your organization is a talent source for competitors, that is a retention and operational security issue worth reviewing. A channel and operations audit that includes talent risk is not a theoretical exercise in this market.

The Broader Takeaway for Regional Acquisition

Retail forex brokers have spent the past 18 months building regional leadership rather than running centralized global marketing teams. That is a structural shift, not a hiring cycle. The brokers investing in people who speak the local language — literally and figuratively — are building acquisition infrastructure that compounds. Trade show relationships, media partnerships, and affiliate trust in a region take time to develop. A regional director who already has those relationships operational on day one is worth more than a global marketer who needs 18 months to establish them.

For operators running regional acquisition in competitive verticals adjacent to forex — including iGaming and crypto, which face similar LATAM regulatory complexity — the same logic applies. Country-level teams or at minimum country-level strategy, enforced through dedicated leadership, will consistently outperform centralized campaign management in a region this fragmented.

Operators who want to understand how their current LATAM or emerging-market acquisition stacks up against this competitive standard should start with a structured assessment of creative localization, compliance alignment, and channel coverage by country. AI-assisted lead qualification can also reduce the cost of scaling engagement across multiple country markets without proportional headcount growth — a practical operational lever for brokers who want regional presence without building a regional team from scratch. The question is not whether to localize LATAM acquisition. The question is how many quarters behind the competition you can afford to be.

Originally reported by Finance Magnates, October 2026.