Marcela Velásquez Montoya

Marcela leads the Experience Design Center of Excellence at Bancolombia, Colombia’s largest bank and part of Grupo Cibest. With more than 20 years of experience across strategic design, innovation, business, and education, she focuses on building design as an organizational capability that shapes business decisions and customer experiences.

Under her leadership, Bancolombia’s multidisciplinary design team grew fivefold over five years, extending its reach to around 70% of the organization’s transformation teams. Her work connects customer understanding with business priorities, bringing product, channel, and technology teams together to address complex challenges and translate customer needs into business opportunities.

Combining strategic design, engineering, and business management, Marcela champions talent development and the organization’s ability to make better decisions around people. Her conviction is that design leadership should shape both what organizations deliver and how they work. In 2025, she received Bancolombia’s “Ser Ejemplo” award in recognition of her leadership.

Previously, she headed EAFIT University’s Product Design Engineering program. She holds a degree in Product Design Engineering and an MBA from EAFIT, and a master’s in Strategic Product Design from Delft University of Technology.