His side of the fence

Bank notes 1: On this US trip, one of the meetings Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho is not exactly looking forward to is the one with potential foreign investors, particularly those eyeing utilities.

You see, that Supreme Court decision against Manila Electric Co. can just as easily apply to any other utility – and that covers power, water, and telecommunications – if any consumer group decides to bring such company to court.

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Bank notes 2: Philippine National Bank executive vice-president and chief credit officer Omar Byron Mier is currently in the process of rationalizing/segmenting the bank’s loan portfolio.

You see, it’s difficult to use a conventional lending model on say, loans of less than P5 million or micro-financing. Doing so would either mean the bank won’t make money or the bank won’t have customers.

The idea is to place loans of less than P100 million under consumer banking and anything higher under corporate banking. (Think about the Citibank set-up where Mr. Mier and bank president Lorenzo Tan came from.)

The rationalization process will be completed by the end of the month or shortly after its annual stockholders meeting.

Despite his name, Mr. Mier traces his father’s roots to Sorsogon. Fact is, the older Mr. Mier loved to read so much that he named his three children after authors. The younger Mr. Mier, for example, is named after Omar Khayyam, the Persian author of the "Rubaiyat" and George Noel Gordon, the fifth Lord Byron. His sister, Shelley Anne, is named, of course, after another Romantic poet, Perey Bysshe Shelley. His brother, Guy Winston, is named after French writer, Guy de Maupassant.

PNB has been operationally in the black since last October, in part because it finally raised its fees on remittances and in part because it seriously went after delingquent credit cardholders.

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Bank notes 3: Just to be on the safe side, Bankard Inc. president Joven Reyes had a feng shui expert run through the company’s newest credit card.

Yes, the one that carries the prosperity colors of green (for the US dollar that is slowly moving away from a completely green, easily counterfeited paper currency) and gold.

Even its hotline has so many eights in it that it’s hard to forget.

Needless to say, all that feng shui got the nod from (uh-uh, not Alfonso Yuchengco, who was not in town) number two boss man, Rizalino Navarro.

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Bank notes 4: A banker who lives in Urdaneta Village is said to have been so angry at seeing the leaves from the neighbor’s tree messing up his yard that he threatened to shoot the gardener the next time those recalcitrant leaves landed on his side of the fence.

By the way, the neighbor is also involved in the financial industry.