Philippine Banking Dearth of Knowledge, Poverty in Intelligence

To conduct a comprehensive survey of bank founder-owners, bank managers, investment leaders, trust executives in the Philippines today, will bring one to misery, sorrow and disgust at the level of knowledge of bankers in the Philippines.

This is not to say that such a case exists only in this particular country. It is common in so many other nations. Only a few bankers truly are aware of their real, noble role as a public service institution, giving and delivering the best kind of service to the people.

In a world where there is no plus side to very small revenue or cash accumulation, bankers are inclined to accommodate rich clientele and Alvin Toffler's dark characters who form the other side of the coin of that phenomenon in modern times that he calls rapid wealth creation: criminals, underworld, terrorists, drug kingpins and the like.

Extraordinary is a bank manager from Antipolo who declares, "from our subsidiary bank, if you have a transaction to settle with our mother bank, I can endorse you all the way so they will provide you all the assistance you need." In the case of a bank branch manager of a large bank at V.A. Rufino St., Makati City, the lady manager says it is impossible to endorse a transaction or provide suggestion to the manager of another branch of the same bank. This Makati bank branch manager wants that all transactions must emanate only from her branch.

What will keep a bank manager from endorsing a client? And what will prevent the bank manager from Antipolo to continue to give positive, constructive aid to clients in linking up with other branches of his bank?

The manager from Antipolo is the epitome of the banker's public service ethic. The manager from V.A. Rufino in Makati is distinctly the portrait of the imbecile banker.

More than 70% to 80% of bankers in the Philippines suffer from a dearth of knowledge and are extremely poor in intelligence as well as wanting in intellect. No one is to blame except their headquarters office and the kind of education bankers get from the Philippine educational system that cannot afford to teach the correct nuances and shades of meaning of banking jargon.

On the part of bank headquarters, the governing policy of their banking corporations are bereft of the desire to promote broader credit to the entrepreneur population. The hard and fast rules of KYC - Know Your Customer, is extremely distorted and warped so much so that even knowing the potential depositors are thieves, murderers, drug lords, gambling lords, possibly as well terrorists fronted for by their relatives and associates, the bank manager will happily endorse the opening of banking relationship with the criminal and proceed to service that enemy of the public.

Effectively, this makes banks Public Enemy, by association, as launderers of the funds of these members of the underworld.

Indeed, the benefit of the bank accepting as much cash and other valuables from these shady characters is tremendous, at least there should be balancing acts on the part of bank management to add a redeeming value to their inclination to accommodate and protect criminal figures.

Compounding the situation of refusal to give away assistance to clients, is the inability of bankers to fulfill their ultimate obligation to service the customer. In many foreign-to-local transactions, if the scheme utilized is new to the Philippine banker, the transaction becomes bogged down not be the absence of interest of the banker but by the lack of fingertip knowledge and second nature skill to attend to the needs of the client.

The exchange between bank management and client becomes endless with no results being delivered by the Philippine bank, whereas the foreign counterpart bank has already done its role: i.e. transmittal of documentary requirements for fund transfer or credit for the Philippine bank client. The time spent becomes long and tedious that all the initial momentum goes to waste.

If the transaction involves a definite, specific timeline, the transaction will go south. The losses might never again be recoverable. For the poor Philippine bank client, the damage could be enormous and irreparable. But will Philippine banker be touched by the final impact upon the client?

They can never probably be affected, unless they did it on purpose and only in a small way. The reason why the Philippine banker will not even think about the great wrong done on the client is that he doesn't know and therefore he could not care less.

Aquino's Pain of Divestment

Headlines:

Philippine Star: Noy, Abad Defend Disbursement Acceleration Program Fund

Sunstar: Aquino hits those equating DAP to PDAF

Manila Standard: Media Spin vs. DAP done by pols

Tribune: Noy says DAP attack divert attention from pork abuses

Imagine a President of a Third World country having an unrestricted access and power of disbursement of a good part of nearly United States Dollars Fifty Three Billion (the exact figure is USD52,443,398,257.95), the equivalent of the Philippine national annual projected expenditure of Philippine Pesos Two Trillion and Two Hundred Sixty Billion (PHP2,260,000,000,000).

The article below shows how difficult it is for a politician, a head of state to part with unregulated spending money.

Politicians maximally utilize persons like Ms. Janet Napoles who divert Philippine peso skims to the United States in suitcases without fear of the Anti-Money Laundering laws, Mr. Zaldy Co (who even ran for Congress himself and won), and many other fund fixers later masquerading as filthy rich financiers (outside of the Forbes List) to steal billions of money from the national treasury.

Much of the thievery is done through the pork barrel - discretionary public funds that are hardly accounted and form part of political accommodations, horse trading between the Executive branch and the Legislative, including the Judiciary.

With a public sector motivated by greed and wanton plunder of the national coffers often with the quiet collusion of members of the banking sector, there is absolutely no way for the government to censure and reform the banking industry simply because it has no moral ascendancy at all.The Philippine President, Mr. Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino 3rd, does not want the pork barrel to be abolished, as evidenced by his own recent statement over national media in defense of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) that is a creative new name for pork barrel. Mr. Aquino the 3rd is adamant that he announced the DAP two years ago.

Therefore, since the 3rd made a public disclosure of this benign, saintly kind of pork barrel, the spending thereof has to really be just and fair but only for all the horrible looking money making ogres concerned, the 3rd not excluded.

There is nothing in this sanitized, beatified, canonized pork barrel for the small entrepreneurs who need money for developmental projects.

Any intervention that must be done to change the way things are being done in the banking system will be initiated by the citizenry as well as well meaning members of the private sector. The issue is not all about simple patriotism, love for country, but the obligation of the creatures sitting in comfortable niches to return to their host country a share of what they have amassed over the years and decades of siphoning the hard earned money of ordinary people in whose names the Philippine bonds and treasury bills are created, among other debentures that average citizens of the Republic are bound to pay for during their maturity.

No banker will not acknowledge this fact, but they close their eyes due to their all-consuming greed and insatiable lust for more and more money, without looking back to where they came from and who are the source of the incomes they derived from their very expert manipulation of currencies, notes, bonds, bills and all the shit in banking. Click here for the rest of this article.

Clearly, Philippine President Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III is suffering from impending separation. Since this president is single, he certainly cannot foresee severing ties with a partner in life.

Its losing the DAP that he fears most. For one who lived in the Malacanang Palace as a youth with his sisters during the height of his mother's power as revolutionary president, enjoying the numerous boxed, suitcased and crated gifts intended for the First Family, losing the DAP is a nightmare. After the term of his late mother, the boxes, suitcases and crates stopped coming.

At the Palace, the new ruling groups would hardly share their blessings. As the then former First Family lamented, life had become too difficult for them at the time. The late lady president would not stop being best heard, best seen, best read with her PR magician Ms. Deedee Sytangco always at her side and beck and call. Her closest sympathizers, Ms. Corazon "Dinky" Soliman propped the late president up as a champion of social development such that in a huge gathering, she said: "I am Cory Aquino! I am NGO."

Now the contractors, NGOs, together with politician and government bureaucrat BFFs, are making waves in the financial community for reaping huge harvests of monies and caching these away in private vaults and banks.

Like the owner of an enterprise, those riding high in the windfall of profit from exceedingly unexpected sales, Aquino cannot divest himself of the DAP. This president will hold on to DAP with determination.

One of the pundits blabbering in the late night watering holes mused about a hint of retirement.

Pundit said, the dark forces are on the heels of Finance Secretary Cesar V. Purisima. Mr. Aquino he said, wants his people to get to the bottom of the attacks on his finance secretary and find out if he will eventually be the target of the attacks. Click here for a glimpse of the assaults against Sec. Purisima.

This pundit person said Malacanang ordered the applications for the supposedly legitimized small town lottery to be scrapped as early as May 2013. Most of the applicants are the same persons behind illegal gambling, the real lords of numbers games in person. The applicants lobbied for continuance, but in vain says pundit.

All the upfront fees collected over the last three years, totaling hundreds of millions up to billions have been forfeited in favor of the administration key people and their subalterns. Hundreds of gaming groups lost their bets on this Administration. It will be back to status quo, pundit reported. No more legitimate Pambansang Loterya ng Bayan (PLB). The hidden numbers game is on again. The counter lobby against PLB was made by a Central Luzon gambling emperor that lords over all illegal gambling in that region and even became closely identified with the former lady chief executive, whose nemesis happened to be Mr. Aquino. Central Luzon emperor wins with his generous offer, thus goodbye all to the hundreds of PLB applicants.

Pundit says, it spells hordes, mountains of invisible income for the powers-that-be. Together with the DAP, that strengthens the Palace but could also, as pundit muses, be a signal for a quick get-away.

We, the little ones will never really know until some illustrious event comes up. At least there is a glint of an idea about why there is so much pain in divestment. Too much, unbearable, pain.

Philippine Banking System Reforms

Philippines: Every average businessman in this country has to go through the eye of a needle to be accommodated by the banks. Businessman Mr. G. Go, actively engaged in small scale financial services for both big and small entrepreneurs says:

"There is an exception. You can always borrow big amounts from banks but you have to have pedigree. If you don't have pedigree forget about borrowing big even from the biggest banks. They won't even look at your loan application. How stupid is that?"

That about translates to this: Bankers look at clients as dogs, cats and cows. Those with pedigree are instantly good clients. and must be given service de luxe and with haste. Those without are immediately considered bad clients and cannot be serviced for big transactions ever.
In Masinag, an officer of RCBC Savings Bank, Ubaldo Sadiarin would go out of his way to offer something to drink to all his visiting customers. Mr. Sadiarin cannot look at his clients as animals, since animals normally don't take coffee, black, with or without sugar or milk. This banker does not only offer coffee, tea or juice. He painstakingly helps you obtain your loan and helps you be able to access the money at the fastest possible time. The fellow must not be the ordinary, brain damaged banker. However, this trait of said banker should not impel his own banking institution to think ill of him. In fact this bank manager should be pirated by the Department of Finance or the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas

Except for Maybank Philippines, very few banks through their run-of-the-mill branch managers, mid-level officers and workers will even offer you water, juice or coffee. How much more a big loan?
Among the brainless, idiotic and impractical policies of banks is imposing quota performance on their bank managers. Whereas there is very meager creativeness among many top bank management officials in promoting their respective bank product brands, to attract clientele, this strict policy of quota is ruthlessly rammed upon the throats of the helpless bank managers and all the bank workers below these managers.

This leads to the great inadequacy of the banking system in pump priming of the economy through the promotion of brisk and dynamic exchanges between and among local business as well as with the rest of the world.

Such a noteworthy posture could be done by not limiting the distribution of the bulk of bank investments, credit, to billionaires like Andrew Tan, Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, Jaime Ayala, Eduardo Cojuangco, Eugenio Lopez, Ramon Ang, Washington SyCip, John Gokongwei, or big time criminal thieves like Janet Lim Napoles, Zaldy Co, jueteng collectors Yolanda Ricafort, Tony Santos, notorious drug dealers like the Lim clan of Malabon-Navotas of the Chinese Triad, Li Lan Yan aka Jackson Dy, Li Tan Hua, Hanson Young (ordered killed by his Chinese Godfather Mr. Stephen Hui while in police detention) among many other dregs of society.

Preferred clients therefore are billionaires, criminals, jueteng collectors, drug lords - not necessarily in that order. Certainly, there are Senators, Senate fixers, Congressmen, Batasan complex arrangers, Governors and their Vice, Mayors and Vice, Board Members, Barangay Chairmen and Boards, appointed officials among a few other money grubbing species.

Gallery of favored bank clientele:

Philippine Billionaires

Drugs Money, Jueteng Money from Yolanda Ricafort, Atong Ang,

Charing Magbuhos, and some from drug lords shown below

Drug Lord Li Lan Yan aka Jackson Dy

Drug Lord Li Tan Hua, son of a Chinese General

Most certainly, there is no need to justify the extremely laughable overriding need to meet headquarter's quota for each and every bank branch manager to merely accommodate deposits, loan applications and other bank requirements from big businessmen and criminals alike at the expense of allowing the majority of transactions in the country to proceed with a positive momentum and spur the economy onwards.

The all-consuming greed of bank founder-owners has given birth to the cross-eyed policies constricting the Philippine banking system. This kind of pernicious culture has even pervaded onto the rural banks and thus created misery after misery from the metropolis to the countrysides.

Therefore, instead of promoting business and helping entrepreneurs to shine, the Philippine banking community has an invisible declaration of war against any businessman who registers his or her enterprise - if and when that hapless creature does not have the pedigree of billionaires, drug lords, jueteng lords, big time thieves of government taxes, among many other obnoxious animals. The big question is why the Philippines' Department of Finance, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the entire economic cluster of the public sector as a whole, would not lift a finger to change this kind of situation.

Whatever functions the Department of Finance assigns to its officers, it is admonished that before the Philippines slides down to the lowest ranking in world economies or the country experiences more and more difficulties with the onslaught of unnatural occurrences like shortages and devastations from disasters like the Boholindol - Cebulindol, gestures with a semblance of bringing reforms to the banking sector should be started as soon as possible.

No self-respecting public sector finance agency in the age of the AMLA should allow this lopsided situation where only billionaires, drug lords, gambling lords and thieves are given preferential treatment. The time for best banking sector practices should be put in place is long overdue. While it is not quaint to say the planet, the entire globe is too unstable for the country to expect to survive the next few hundred years, the worst that could happen without reforming the unfair practice of bankers in the Philippines is for the country to perpetually be a supply economy.
As it is, even our human resource is being supplied all over the world and very few complain.
There is no rice to export, no trees and forests to log over, little trickles of gold to mine with the banks benefiting from all the harvest without giving back good banking service to their host: the people of the Philippines. That includes the entrepreneurs within the population.
The credit cards Metro Bank and foreign credit institution VISA, (e.g. Unionbank Prepaid Visa, BPI Prepaid, PNB Prepaid, PSBank Prepaid, Security Bank Prepaid among many others) promotes credit that is already prepaid before you spend a cent for purchases.
A large number of law firms and collection agencies all over the country have benefited up to 45% commissions share for recovering long lost debts for credit card companies and banks.
The question is, when all over the world especially in the US Army, people start shying away from using credit cards because it buries one in serious perpetuating debt burdens, more if you are not scion or heir to the tycoons in Forbes' List, Philippine banks are obsessed with selling that product: the plastic money.
And 99% of members of the Bankers' Association of the Philippines are racing against each other in selling insurance and pension plans without letting the enterpreneur class to succeed.
These locos must have lard as brains.
Why can't the Philippines' bankers offer various products, differing types of credit and pretend their bank managers understand how to use the SWIFT transmission, letters of credit, bank guarantees, term notes, and all other kinds of debentures without concentrating only on the Philippine Government as creditor?
Banks buy and buy treasury bills, government bonds and rediscount the bills and bonds at a fat profit but they cannot lend back with a smile to the people of this country.

The Philippine banking system cannot perpetuate this kind of situation where the only valued customers are the rich, the close friends and relations of bankers, lumped together with the drug lords, public fund thieves (Janet Napoles, Zaldy Co, et al), jueteng lords and other criminals.

This is not a country only of billionaires, millionaires, friends and bankers' close relations as well as the shit, waste and rejects of society such as heinous criminals. This is a country of nearly 100,000,000 Filipinos with millions of enterprising ones engaged in business in both the formal and informal economies of scale.

Colombia and Mexico of the famous illegal drugs, Switzerland, Singapore, Hongkong and the Caymans, among a few other havens of those with money that are mostly dirty and stained with the blood of millions, may be thriving from accommodation of unclean funds but the banking communities in these places do not necessarily just favor the Sys, Tans Ayalas, and their ilk, or their counter parts in the Underworld. They service legitimate businessmen more than the Philippine banking system does and do help their economies to grow, one way or another.

Thus there must be loose screws somewhere in the brains of the owner-founders of our local banks for they cannot foresee a Philippines with a thriving entrepreneur class, vibrant and alive, competing with the rest of the world while offering Filipino-style world class products and services.

As the website www.qualitychange.org declares:

Policy regime change is needed in the business and especially in the finance sector. The old paradigm of the Philippines and selected vassal type states with supplier economies, must be revolutionized. This will depend mostly on the act of the young, emerging, up-and-coming captains of industry.

The history of Philippine finance has been that of subservience and excessive docility towards superior super powers or stronger industrial economies. This cannot be the case any longer. Even with the excursion of individuals or groups like Enrique Razon to foreign frontiers, Ayala and other entrepreneurs - Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., Lucio Tan, Henry Sy, John Gokongwei to foreign enterprise destinations or missionary ports such as New Zealand, Australia, China, Latin America, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, among many others, much has to be repaired in the Philippines.

Benevolent jump-starting credit from both the public and the private sector is close to non-existent, breeding unsophisticated but widespread corruption within the private sector; the government is most of all helpless to stem this kind of graft and corruption within the world of Philippine business. The doctrine of trust as the most important item for purchase in the Philippines is extremely prostituted to nauseating proportions. At the end of the day, private enterprise becomes the receiving end of chastisement and censure for entering into haphazardly concocted schemes that bleed the public treasury dry or siphon the blood of the average consumer publics.

While banks deprive the vast majority of the country of credit, the financial sector lends indiscriminately to public sector institutions that simply steal the borrowed funds or connive with private business groups or ghost, or shell non-profit service providers to divert the loans and bank the same in private accounts.

The simple equation in this situation ultimately involves government and the people. If small entrepreneurs decide to boycott the entire Philippine banking sector, there will be a small dent on the earnings of the sector. With the interlinked interests of those at the top levels of government and the banking system, the public sector cannot give up easily on its support for the banking industry. But a compassionate government will at least admonish the bankers that a sufficiently acceptable new tack should be taken to uplift the economy much, much higher than its present peak performance.

Something has to give and it has to be soon. The Philippine government must become more responsive to the needs of the entrepreneurs of this country so that revenues coming therefrom will improve. And show a little more compassion to its constituents instead of completely being devoid of it for the sake of mindless smoke belching and skirt chasing.

Related articles:

Assessment of the problems of the Philippine financial sector

Issues and challenges facing the banking sector

Speed up reforms - World Bank tells Philippines

hmes2013: Will there be more Negros and Bohol Killer Quakes?

Source: http://www.hazmapping.com

From over 40 casualties, the death toll has risen to nearly 100 in the Carmen, Bohol Province-Cebu City earthquake. At that figure, the Carmen-Cebu tremor can qualify as a Killer Quake. Cebu and nearby areas has to be declared to be in a state of calamity. There are limited manuevers that aircraft can make at the Cebu airport due to the cracking and opening up of the airport's runways.

The six million dollar question is: how many more incidents like those in Carmen, Bohol and Cebu City and the other ones in Leyte, Samar will we be expecting?

Were the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Philvolcs) prepared adequately enough with equipment to monitor ground movement, tectonic plate disturbance, the nearly 100 deaths could have been avoided. 27 Billion Philippine Pesos is earmarked for pork barrel in the 2014 General Appropriations Act out of a total expenditure program of 2.26 Trillion Philippine Pesos. Would it be difficult to allocate even half of that pork barrel budget for emergency preparedness, disaster risk reduction, equipment upgrade?

Past Warnings of Big Disaster

This site has been warning the public for more than four years since the time of the former President, Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Due to the total torpedoing of the private sector (Corinthian Gardens, Forbes Park, Dasmarinas Village, the owners of high rise condominiums at the left side of EDSA southbound, among others), of the program for predicting highly lethal effects of a major tremor in Metro Manila and the replication of this effort in many urban areas in the country by the same sector in collusion with some corrupt officials in the government, a large disaster and environmental hazards summit was proposed to be supported by the Philippine Government and the United Nations, among other institutions from many other sectors - including the non-profit (minus the Napoles et al NGOs).

Wanting responses

It is reiterated that in the time of Mrs. Arroyo, only the then Administrator of the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA), Ms. Elaine Bautista, now Mrs. Horn, had the small effort to make an email message to the proponents of the 2010 Disaster and Environmental Hazards Mapping Summit. And that was only because the United Nations Environment Programm (UNEP)  told the former Ms. Bautista to get in touch with HMES 2010 organizing group. At the time, concurrent to her post in MARINA, Ms. Bautista was considered a friend of UNEP and a significant point person for the Philippine Government in relation to selected UNEP concerns - particularly about emergency and assistance.

When Mr. Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino 3rd became President, the organizing group wrote to Ms. Corazon Juliano Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and Gen. Voltaire Tuvera Gazmin. Ms. Soliman did not respond. It was noticed however that several days later, Gen. Gazmin, the Secretary of the Department of National Defense gave an interview to national media.

In that interview, when Gazmin was asked about what the people should do when a disaster strikes, he replied: "Run for your lives."

Carrying the barest minimum luggage in their bodies, the poor, helpless people in above photos must have taken advice similar to that of Gen. Voltaire Gazmin's to leave and forget belongings elsewhere and to "run for your lives."

It will appear that the kind of response the government has given is exceedingly wanting in substance. It is hoped however that as a grandfather and parent, Gazmin to no fault of his own was merely showing his personal concern for the safety of the life of the average citizen. He was probably very well-meaning and was admonishing the people not to bring their television sets, beds, furniture, cash safety vaults, washing machines, cabinets, sofa, stoves with their fuel gas tanks, desk-stand-ceiling fans, air conditioners, desktop computers and refrigerators outside of their homes and instead to proceed to a more safe location and be saved in time of major catastrophe.

The head of the Philvolcs, Dr. Renato Solidum absolutely cannot be faulted and is blameless. For decades, had been ready to accept the support for equipment upgrade and modernization. Despite the billions of funds allocated to the departments of the government, the great oversight of perpetually forgetting to take care of the Philvolcs modernization programme has consistently been committed by this government.

Despite the billions lost for the personal enrichment of selected persons in our public sector and their intimate partners in very enterprising undertakings in the private sector, no one has shown keen interest in allowing the Philvolcs to finally get hold of the adequate funding for acquisition of hardware and software that will highly increase its forecasting accuracy and its earthquake trending studies and research on the major faults all over the country. Click here for more.

Writings on the Wall

It was forecast at the early part of October that new information will come to the fore about the PDAF scandal perpetrated by husband and wife Jaime and Janet Napoles as well as lawyers, accountants, runners, drivers, maids and house boys as well as dead people whose names were used in the NGOs.

These details of the new findings revealed currently changes the picture for all of us. Suddenly, the air feels rotten, the smell is too pungent. It is as if the smell of a decayed, decrepit, rotting Malacanang is spreading all over the country.

As www.qualitychange.org admonishes for now, "for change to happen, wake up everyone."

Announcement

A business organization internet site will publish an open letter, addressed to the top-ranked Asia billionaire owner of a huge retail-banking-real estate-gambling conglomerate with regard to illegal business practices without due regard to the parties that are robbed of the opportunity to profit from their proprietary interests.

This letter will be emailed to various public sector agencies concerned with providing legal remedies and sanctions on individuals and groups committing illegal acts similar to those perpetrated by the retail-banking-real estate-gambling conglomerate in the Philippines.