Rafael Fernandez de Mesa likes to open with a joke. In another life, he says, he might have been the first Rafa people talked about. Instead, that distinction belongs to Rafael Nadal. Fernandez de Mesa found his arena elsewhere, trading baseline rallies for balance sheets.
As a teenager in Miami, he was not merely good at tennis. He was top five in Florida and top 10 nationally. After high school, he enrolled at Texas A&M University, only to decide that the classroom could wait. The tour beckoned.
For five years, he chased ranking points across the unforgiving Futures circuit. His highest world ranking reached 451, an achievement that sounds impressive until one understands tennis economics.
“If I was 451 in any other sport, I would have made a good living. But in tennis, you basically lose money and the career window is very short.”
The line lands lightly, but the decision behind it did not. At 24, he stepped away from professional tennis, choosing realism over romance. The discipline stayed. The direction changed.
Miami had already been grooming his next act. The city’s dramatic real estate cycles offered a live masterclass in boom, bust, and reinvention. He earned a broker’s license while still in school and closed a few property sales, discovering that he enjoyed the mechanics of a deal as much as the mechanics of a serve.
He completed his degree in international business at Florida International University and began his career in banking with BBVA and Banco Santander. Credit and risk became his new playing field. The work was analytical, precise, and structured.
Still, something tugged.
College summers spent interning in the Philippines with Union Bank of the Philippines had given him a different vantage point on the country of his roots. When he began scanning for his next move, he posed a simple question to himself.
“Why not look into the Philippines?”
Sixteen years later, that question reads less like curiosity and more like foresight.
Today, Fernandez de Mesa serves as president and chief executive officer of Aboitiz Economic Estates under Aboitiz Land, part of Aboitiz Equity Ventures. His mandate involves shaping large scale economic estates, long term projects that require patience, capital discipline, and conviction.
His entry into the family enterprise was not automatic. Growing up in the United States meant he was not immersed in the business on a daily basis. Yet each visit to the Philippines revealed something compelling about the enterprise and the people behind it.
“When I would come to the Philippines and visit, and I would see it from that perspective, how close my cousins were and how proud everyone was about the family company, that, in a way, had an impact on my decision to pursue working in the family business.”
The appeal was not just professional. It was communal.
He requested to join the real estate business after completing a training program at AEV, aligning long held interest with hard earned financial training. His years in banking proved invaluable. Real estate may be built with cranes and concrete, but it is sustained by underwriting and risk management.
Tennis, meanwhile, remains his quiet co founder.
As a teenager competing internationally before smartphones made parents omnipresent, he was handed two weeks of expense money, a tournament address, and trust.
“You figure out the rest.”
It is a deceptively simple philosophy. Navigate unfamiliar cities. Adapt to different cultures. Solve problems without waiting for rescue. Build friendships with competitors. The lessons in independence and resilience have translated seamlessly into corporate leadership.
The athlete who once managed travel budgets now manages capital allocations. The player who learned to reset after a lost set now steers projects through market cycles.
The long rallies simply take place in boardrooms instead of stadiums.
He may not have lifted a Grand Slam trophy, but Fernandez de Mesa did build his own court. And on it, he is still playing the long game.
