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.

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Issues and challenges facing the banking sector

Speed up reforms - World Bank tells Philippines