Center for Corporate Social Responsibility

This is a great honor that you are giving me today, so I will begin by thanking the Honorable Board of Judges, the Junior Chambers International and the Asian Institute of Management for considering me worthy of the first Ramon V. del Rosario, Sr. Award for NationBuilding.

I am delighted that I can join my colleague and friend Senen Bacani in accepting your generous citation. It is the superlative work in the business frontlines by leaders like Senen that makes the efforts of finance men like me look perceptive and significant.

This award is all the greater because it honors the memory of a business leader whose example was an inspiration in my own life, and whom I had the privilege of knowing personally both in business life and in the diplomatic service.

From this knowledge of Ambassador Ramon V. del Rosario, Sr., I know with certainty that this award is not meant for me personally; it means rather to honor the organization I represent -- the men and women of Plantersbank, without whose collective effort and dedication there would be nothing to cite or celebrate here today.

Throughout his life Ambassador del Rosario was a builder of corporations and organizations, most of which are now enduring institutions in our country, including Phinma, the Management Association of the Philippines and the Asian Institute of Management. As I heard him say for many a time, a strong economy and a strong nation is not built by individuals working alone; it is built by men and women working together toward a common goal.

So it is in the name of the men and women of Planters Development Bank that I accept this award. And it is on their behalf that I convey to you their heartfelt thanks and best wishes.

One way is to show the trajectory of its life through charts, statistics and graphic reports. It shows growth in resources and number of clients. It depicts how over time a company climbs up to be among the top in the rankings.

Another way is to tell us its story with a human scale -- through the faces of those who labor at its mission and the people and organizations whose lives are touched or affected by its work. This way of telling does not give us the aggregate numbers – it highlights the anxieties at the start of programs and the joys when people are helped, problems are overcome and goals are achieved.

Using the first method, we could speak here of how Plantersbank, starting 38 years ago with assets of P500,000, became the institution it is today, commanding billions in resources and capital. We could look at charts detailing how as a development bank we have grown to become our country’s 19^th largest banking institution. We could talk about how its bottom line has been maintained and raised over the decades – even through the years of crisis and busts.

It would miss the story of how we in Plantersbank stumbled, you might say, into our development mission. When I bought the small Bulacan-based development bank in 1972, I was just striking out on my own after a stint as a senior executive in one of our country’s largest banks. My business plan was to grow the bank, transfer it to Makati, and then transform it into a commercial bank catering to large corporate accounts.

Because of the bank’s small size and location in the countryside, our clients were small businessmen and entrepreneurs. One of these was the farmers’ cooperative in San Simon, Pampanga whose biggest problem was their having to sell their produce at low prices after the harvest and not having capital to farm the land when it was time to plant again.

In the process of assisting them, and people like them, we saw how finance could impact on the lives of small businesses, cooperatives and communities. We saw how the purposive but prudent financing could enable the San Simon farmers to acquire their own rice-milling facilities and avail of quedan financing. We discovered that we could help these SMEs in better managing their accounts. Above all, we were able to teach them how to make finance a vital tool for growing their businesses.

From this seed emerged the tree. The early experience led us to a critical crossroad. We either had to evolve into a commercial bank as we originally planned or take the road less taken. We chose to cast our lot with the SMEs.

The choice was by no means easy. We had no models to follow. The conventional wisdom was that small business was difficult, costly and risky to lend to. We had to learn by trial and error.

One was our decision to grow through mergers and acquisitions. We bought smaller banks to expand our reach to our SMEs throughout the country.

Secondly, with our initial successes, we attracted prestigious foreign institutional partners, which greatly expanded our resources for lending to SMEs. These included the Netherlands Finance Company (FMO), the Asian Development Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank.

Thirdly, we developed our own Plantersbank model for SME finance, based on our own experience of what works and what can best help SMEs to succeed.

In expanding our expertise and reach toward SMEs, we at Plantersbank never thought or imagined that we could impact in a big way the economic life in our country. We were just doing what we could within our sector – doing our best to help out and do business in the process.

Where nobody wanted to lend to SMEs when we began, today, more banks are lending to them, opening SME divisions in the process. Where mobilizing resources for SME lending was difficult back in the 1970s, today, we can tap resources on many fronts. Where nobody would partner with a development bank back then, today there is more respectability and regard for the work of development banks. And the surest measure of success is the growth of our SME clients whom it has been an honor to serve and partner with.

Nothing has made us prouder than to see our SME partners rise from the bottom to become large or medium enterprises – so much so that some of them are now well-known companies and brands. Some have even won awards and citations for excellence in their fields. To mention a few are Splash, a leading wellness company, Phoenix Sun International Corporation who won the CSR Leadership Award for Sustainable Community Development and Profood International whose owner, Justin Uy, was one of the finalists in the 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Nothing has been more exhilarating than to see the jobs that they have generated in the countryside, and the contribution that they have made to economic growth.

To our surprise, our little success has caught a measure of national and international attention. The former president asked us to work with her administration in expanding services to SMEs. Internationally, our model for SME finance caught the attention of the United Nations and other countries. And HarvardBusinessSchool did a study on our bank, citing it as one of only three development banks in the world that have successfully pursued “double bottomline banking” and contributed to the alleviation of poverty.

Whatever all this may finally signify we do not know. We will only say that we have tried in our work to combine the soundest principles of banking and finance and combined with a sense of empathy for the needs and hopes of small entrepreneurs. We have tried to put resources at the service of wealth creation among people who normally do not get financing, except at a very steep price. And we have tried to use our expertise in helping small entrepreneurs manage their finances better and plan for the future better.

It is perhaps in the nature of awards like this to focus its attention on what has already been achieved and what has gone before.

Yet in an important way also, days like these are not just about yesterdays, they are also about tomorrows. They remind us about how futures are built.

I think this is especially pertinent at this time in our country. Today, we stand in what historians call “an open moment” in history – when the future is literally before us, ready to be shaped and molded to our hopes and visions.

With the election of President Benigno Aquino III to the Presidency, we have a leader who has raised goodwill for our people and our country across the world. We have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave aside forever the image of “a sick man” that has haunted our nation for generations. Under his leadership, we have the chance to truly use purpose and principle as a driving force for change and progress.

In this light, ladies and gentlemen, we at Plantersbank see this award as a summons to us to be engaged in this new program of national transformation that is now upon us. To this call, we gladly say, Yes.

As an institution, we have decided to go down market and enter less developed areas of our country so we can reach more small entrepreneurs and help them grow their businesses, and in that way do our share in alleviating poverty in the countryside.

We are integrating our training arm, the PDcenter, SME.com, our internet company, the SMEBusinessPark, the first-ever ecozone-based park for SMEs and other projects into one large SME-enabling initiative – the SMEResourceCenter. This way, we can assist SMEs across the archipelago in a bigger way.

We are expanding our orientation from a double bottomline bank into a triple bottomline institution committed to being good stewards of the environment. We believe that sustainable development is the way to go for our country.

Finally, we will take part – individually and together – in the effort to promote good corporate governance and combat corruption in our country. This cannot be over-emphasized. Most of our failures and shortcomings as a nation are the result of corrosive influence of corruption on our economic and national life. We believe that unless this menace is tamed, poverty and underdevelopment will be our lot as a nation.

We believe that we can transform our country into a better place, because all of us – in our own ways, from our respective corners of society – will contribute to making it happen.

Let me say in closing -- to the family of Ambassador Ramon V. del Rosario Sr, to the Junior Chambers International, and to the Asian Institute of Management – that we at Plantersbank will thank you for this exceptional honor in the best way we know how – by contributing our utmost to building a future for all here in our country.