The Making of a New FICOBank: A Business Outlook
in Light of Recent Development in Banking

As the business environment in banking is becoming more competitive and challenging due to continuing globalization and technology advancement, most of the countryside financial institutions have experienced a downward-spiraling effect on their financial margin. Being cast into intense competition, they’re forced to compromise their credit standards to some extent, so as to accommodate borrowers with apparently high risk, just to generate volume. Our Bank is fully aware of this predicament that is plaguing the hardcore financial institutions with conventional or “balance-sheet” banking approach. And since we want to get out of the box, we are compelled to redefine our business, chart a more vibrant future, and try to do things beyond the usual.

Most of us are already aware that we are on the threshold of converting/upgrading our Bank from a cooperative bank to a thrift bank. We were able to get off the ground last year after the Monetary Board of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has approved our application. And as soon as we get the authority from BSP to operate as a thrift bank, after complying with its SEC-registration requirement, we will immediately start the ball rolling.

Our corporate transformation paints a brighter business outlook. As a corporative thrift bank, we have a well-built organizational form and ownership structure, and a well-crafted corporate personality—a brand image—expressing what we stand for and how we intend to make an impact, with clear value added, on the industry we are into. We have an ambitious, but doable, future direction guiding all our future plans and programs.

We are, by and large, a Bank that makes a difference. Our Bank, as a people’s bank and a “grand-winning product” by itself, with a unique and sustainable competitive advantage in the financial services industry, can do many things now for the many small people who are its customers, investors and owners—all rolled into one. We are committed to bring about the economic ascendancy of the many people in the countryside by harnessing their untapped savings and investment resources, providing loans and other financial services, and rewarding everybody who fully participates in our banking activities. As such, we are all the more resolved to grow our owner-clients like we grow our Bank.

We will develop our new business through four major avenues, namely: targeting hundreds-of-thousand corporative members; pursuing a two-stage network expansion; providing new financial products and services that are tailored to the needs of the market; and establishing allied undertakings that will complement FICOBank’s growth. As a corporative bank, we will professionally manage our Bank like a banking corporation and continuously practice the essential principles of cooperativism.

Knowing that service delivery is the most important part of our “grand-winning product,” we will be establishing better service-delivery standards at our operating unit level for making loans, taking deposits, handling withdrawals, providing fee-based services, recruiting corporative members, reeducating existing clients, and promoting the corporative ideology. With better service delivery, the better we build the implicit intangibles, like what we want to be known for and what our clients will tell others about us.

As a new FICOBank, our Bank will not only be banking with a HEART, but will even be soaring like an EAGLE.

- Herminio G. Ocampo
   President & CEO, FICOBank