Making PNB chair Flor Gozon Tarriela: Faith & Finance

The chairman’s office on the 10th floor of the Philippine National Bank (PNB) corporate headquarters along Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard in Pasay City is way too quiet at noontime. Here where the offices of the bank’s directors are located side by side, one can surmise that decisions and deals are decided upon behind closed doors, in hushed tones, with a few strokes on the keyboard perhaps or a flourish of pen on dotted line.

From the glass windows of this office, the view stretches far out into Manila Bay; down below is an emerging boom town, the shape of things to come.

Since last year, Florencia Gozon Tarriela has been occupying this office as chairman of the country’s former premier government bank.

If you are in Tarriela’s shoes, it is not hard to have faith and hope, even in a country with seemingly not much to hope for.

A professional banker for more than 30 years, she has been walking the corridors of finance long enough to know that there is always hope, even for a moribund economy amid political uncertainty.

There are two things she has learned from all her years in the high-brow profession. "In business," she says, "the customer is always king. But in life there’s nothing you can do without Him."

The force of Tarriela’s faith, in the twin aspects of her life, is both acquired and inborn. A graduate of economics from the University of the Philippines (UP) with a Masters Degree also in economics from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), Tarriela hails from one of the first Christian families in the Philippines.

"My grandmother Magdalena Santos Lapus of Malabon was one of the first Christians in Malabon," she shares.

It is almost a cliche that business and banking, or any other industry for that matter, is not always laced with Christian ethos. How does a finance executive keep her personal and professional life in synch?

"I cannot separate my professional life from the faith," she says. "That I am a professional banker and a follower of Christ are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary."

Was there ever a point in her life when she has had to sacrifice what she believes in spiritually to accommodate the demands of her high-profile job?

"It hasn’t come to that point," she says with a smile."The Lord has taken care of that."

Tarriela joined PNB in 2001 as a director and assumed the chairmanship of the bank in May 2005. But even with her academic degrees and achievements in the banking circle–she was the first Filipino female vice president of Citibank (Philippine branch) and has served as an undersecretary of the Department of Finance (DOF)–Tarriela believes that it wouldn’t be possible without the hand of God.

When she retired from Citibank in 2000, she was eagerly looking forward to retirement. It was, she says, a comforting end to the rat race. No more 16-hour work days and life on the road in a pressure cooker. She was eyeing more time for her now grown up children and tending to her garden in Antipolo.

But God had other plans. Even before she could leave for a family vacation in Australia to celebrate her retirement, she was offered a position at the Department of Finance by no less than former Finance Secretary Jose Pardo and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) governor Rafael Buenavantura, her former boss at Citibank.

"I looked at it as another opportunity to serve God and country," she says. "I was in the private sector for roughly three decades; it may have been a good idea to serve the government for once in my life." In this she follows her father’s footsteps: Benjamin Gozon served as Secretary of Agriculture during the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal.

As finance undersecretary, Tarriela was in charge of administration and government financial institutions. "In government as in the private sector," she says, "you strive for excellence."

In fairness, she points out, the DOF and BSP are run very professionally and her stint with the government was one opportunity to contribute her professional expertise to the country. She has also served as alternate member of the BSP’s Monetary Board, the Land Bank of the Philippines, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC) and as former board member of the Central Bank board of liquidators.

She resigned in 2001 along with other DOF executives to allow the newly installed Arroyo administration to pick its own economic team.

Being a professional banker and non-political, she was offered the directorship at PNB.

"PNB at that time was still very much identified as a·9overnment bank," she says. "It was 45 percent government owned, but from September of last year, it became majority owned by the Lucio Tan group."

Tarriela has come full circle. As chairman of another private bank, she is once more in the turf that she knows best–commercial and investment banking.

"God is good," she states. "He plans and controls my life."

Visitors to her PNB office are greeted by her warm and effusive welcome and an air of unmistakable grace coming from someone who has so much to share about her life and her faith.

"God is good," she reiterates, sipping tea in an early afternoon tete-a-tete with STARweek.

Before the year 2000, when the world was filled with the anxiety of the Y2K bug, Tarriela co-wrote a book with Butch Jimenez entitled "Coincidences and Miracles," a compilation of stories of people who rose above the adversities of their own lives through the help of God–a mother surviving her son’s incurable illness, a woman who escaped a wayward truck by a hairline, a man on the brink of bankruptcy who donated what little he had to a prayer group and received in return more than ten-fold of what he gave. The stories flooded in from everywhere, and there were so many stories it merited the publication of a sequel.

"What we were striving to show then was that people need not be afraid of life’s adversities or of big challenges. The world will survive in the Lord’s embrace."

As chairman of PNB, Tarriela is involved with policies, so her schedule is not as hectic now. She comes to the office three times a week. She now has time to attend to her many interests, including gardening and protecting the environment.

But when we visited, she had another task to share–chairmanship of the finance committee of the forthcoming Franklin Graham Festival.

As a professional banker and a Christian, Tarriela may be the best person to head the finance committee of the evangelical festival to be held from February 2 to 5 at the Luneta.

"But I wasn’t prepared for this," she laughs. "I was asked to head the committee to raise funds for the festival and I said I will help with the best I can but appoint someone else. But they said, no, you have to do it for the Lord."

The Franklin Graham Festival in Manila, she explains, will be the first to be held in Asia and is seen as a jumping board for holding other festivals in the region. In fact, she says, after the Philippines, the next festival is scheduled to be held in Okinawa, Japan in November.

"As the only Christian country in Asia, it is only fitting that we have the honor of hosting the first Franklin Graham Festival in Asia," she says. The last evangelistic festival held in the country was in 1977 conducted by Franklin’s father, renowned evangelist Billy Graham.

But coming amidst an economic slump, how did she rise to the challenge of pooling funds for the huge gathering? "The money is there but is still in the pocket," she says with equal measure of truth and jest.

Just as it was in the Billy Graham Festival in 1977, when organizers noted the "greatest unity among churches that we’ve ever experienced," the Christian community in the country has given its full support to this project. The committee’s office at the Antel Condominium in Ortigas Center, for example, was given to them free for one year by architect Manuel Go, a Christian.

The very committee organizing the festival is a miracle in itself. There were so many volunteers the committe never lacked workers. Says James Tioco, chief of staff of the Metro Manila Franklin Graham Festival committee, an anonymous donor came in one day with P500,000. "God is at work, in His way, in His own time," he affirms.

According to Dan Andrew Cura, chairman of the communications committee of the festival, "We thought it fitting to invite Franklin Graham to the country at this time, considering the political, economic and social climate in the country. The pervading sense of gloom gives us reason to work together as a church. We cooperated beyond denominational lines to host this festival to give the people ‘a message of hope’ and to listen to the word of God."

The objective of the Metro Manila Franklin Graham Festival is to mobilize the greatest number of people to hear the gospel and be invited to respond, to be discipled and integrated in the local church to worship and serve the Lord. Not massive evangelism but personal evangelism on a massive scale, they stress.

"The problems of the Philippines if you look at it from a historical point of view," says Tarriela, "are the same throughout the years–poverty, politics, corruption, etc. It is recurring. Maybe what we need is not strategy but a transformation from within. If we consider ourselves as children of God and we are surrounded by His wealth and generosity, it is possible for us to look at life with more optimism and dynamism. We will thrive in His guidance, strive for excellence knowing that our life is meant to be in service of the Lord."

But then how does one reconcile the fact that, as the only Christian nation in Asia, we seem to lose track of our faith and our belief that we are children of God and we have at our disposal the wealth of His blessings?

"That is what we have to find for ourselves–individually and as a nation. We need to find our faith, an inspiration and that one message of hope to accept the Lord once more into our lives," Tarriela says.

There is such a thing, she says, as the transformative power of faith: Let Him in your life and He’ll do the rest.

The Franklin Graham Festival will be held every night from Feb. 2 to 5 at the Quirino Grandstand. It is free and open to the public, Christians and non-Christians. The festival will also host a national breakfast on Feb. 1 at The Manila Hotel with the country’s leaders in attendance. "We will pray for healing, for our leaders, for guidance, for unity and peace, for our country," Cura explains.

Tarriela’s 10th floor office may as well be the perfect metaphor for what the Metro Manila Franklin Graham Festival hopes to achieve in this country. From the top, it is always easy to embrace a vision, to see more of life in the expansive vista and feel the throbbing vitality of coincidences and miracles. Life indeed has an author.

For more information on the Franklin Graham Festival, call 916-3014.