RSVP: Attending

Country: United States

Company: Bling Nation

Category: entrepreneur

Bio:

Wenceslao Casares is co-CEO of Bling Nation, a mobile payments company he founded in 2007 and a partner of MECK, Ltd, a private investment partnership.

He founded Lemon Bank, a Brazilian retail bank for the poor, in June 2002. Lemon Bank is now the largest microfinance institution in Brazil.

He is also the founder of Wanako Games, a US based developer of console videogames that seeks to leverage the creativity of Latin American talent. The company won the “Game of the Year” award for Xbox Live in 2006. Wanako Games was sold to Vivendi Universal (Euronext: VIV).

In 1997 Casares founded Patagon, an Online Brokerage. As the Company expanded throughout Latin America, Casares lived in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and New York City. The company also expanded into online banking in Spain and Germany. Patagon was the fist Latin American online broker and online Bank. It was sold to spanish bank Santander (NYSE: STD).

In 1994 Casares launched Internet Argentina S.A., the first Internet Service Provider in the country. He then sold that Company, in order to establish Patagon.

Casares was born in 1974 in a sheep ranch in Patagonia, Argentina. At age 17 he spent a year in Washington, Pennsylvania as a member of the Rotary Youth Exchange program. He then attended the University of San Andres, Argentina’s top business school; however, he interrupted his studies in order to start Patagon.

In 1998 he was selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur, an international non-profit organization committed to identifying, supporting and promoting the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders in emerging-markets. He is an elected member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders for Tomorrow (GLT), and attends Davos since 2001. He is also a member of the Young Presidents Organization and has completed the Harvard Business School’s Owners and Presidents Management Program.

As part of his philanthropic and non-for-profit activities he served on the board of the Viva Trust and currently serves on the Board of Endeavor. He also has established the Fundacion Sintesis with the goal of inspiring the next generation of social and political leaders in Latin America.

He lives with his wife and three children in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/wcasares

Twitter: www.twitter.com/wences