Researching International Businesses

Esteban Xifré-Villar (US'07, C'11)
Senior Associate, Global Intelligence Operations Center, PricewaterhouseCoopers

While majoring in business and economics at Principia College, Esteban Xifré-Villar interned in California at JumpSport Inc.—which opened a door on the world. Following graduation, he helped JumpSport get its Fitness Trampoline into Spanish-speaking markets in Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Spain, and the Dominican Republic.

That experience led to graduate school at The George Washington University, where he earned a master’s degree in international trade and investment policy.

A native Spanish speaker from Uruguay who is also fluent in Portuguese, Xifré is now a Senior Associate, specializing in Latin America within the Global Intelligence Operations Center at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Xifré and his team use syndicated databases, risk and compliance databases, and publicly available information to conduct intelligence gathering on corporations and their affiliates in order to identify risks to PwC clients, including corruption, regulatory violations, government affiliations, conflicts of interest, and so on.

Xifré recalls one of the College professors in his major who had a big impact on him—Jim Bilsborrow (C’65), who taught Finance. “It was the hardest class I’d ever taken,” he says, “but it was a great introduction to how to break down a complex problem into its component parts, to see how the pieces make up the whole.” In addition, he says two abroad experiences deepened his view of the world.

Summing up his School and College experiences, Xifré notes, “Principia prepared me to lead, and the faculty made me want to be a lifelong learner.”

This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in the Winter 2018 Purpose.