Banking sector settles into ‘new normal’ but new threats seen

(Last of three parts)

Maya Deguito turned 40 last July.

But for a banker who was, until February 2016, at the top of her game and on an upward trajectory in her career, the former branch manager of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.’s controversial Jupiter Street branch in Makati City said she no longer intended to return to the industry where she built a reputation for her ability to woo high net worth clients.

Not that she could return right now. She and some senior officials of the Yuchengco-family controlled RCBC are respondents in complaints filed by the Anti-Money Laundering Council for allegedly facilitating the illegal entry of $81 million in funds stolen from the Bangladeshi central bank into the local financial system.

Deguito maintained she was innocent of the charges, and had only acted under orders from her superiors, and had followed banking protocols, including alerting the bank’s head office about possible irregularities in the controversial remittance from overseas.

“Before all this happened, I was at the peak of my career,” she said in a telephone interview with the Inquirer. “I had just gotten promoted and I had a rank of vice president.”

While the charges against her and other bank officials are still pending in the courts, she said she would not return even if given the opportunity.

“I worked in banking for 16 years,” Deguito said. “I started at the branch level as a teller and rose from the ranks.”

Poached from her previous employer precisely because of her knack for drawing in wealthy depositors, the former branch manager said she had “nothing more to prove” in terms of her career.

But she acknowledges that her life today is radically different from how it was only a few months ago.

Although her personal funds were not frozen by authorities (“They almost did,” she said), her alleged role in the biggest money laundering case to hit local shores prompted banks to order her personal bank accounts closed.

Banks also inexplicably canceled her credit cards—a convenience she cannot enjoy to this day.

“In a way, it’s good because I get to stay debt free,” she said, but added that the loss of a regular income and the loss of access to financial services that people take for granted had forced her, her husband and their three children to tighten their belts.

“We have some savings, and my husband makes enough for us,” Deguito said. “But we’ve had to make some adjustments, including our children.”

The changes in her lifestyle, it seems, mirror the changes everyone in the financial industry has been making as well.

According to Association of Bank Compliance Officers president Dante Fuentes, the local banking industry has had to make its own difficult adjustments in the wake of the Bangladesh Bank cyber heist.

“Today, it’s the reputation of the bank that’s at stake,” he said in an interview, explaining how financial institutions had become more vigilant against practices that were permitted in the past, including giving some valued clients a free pass when it came to conducting thorough due diligence on their transactions.

“Long term relationships sometimes have to be broken,” Fuentes said, even as he explained that rigid internal deliberations happen regularly within banks to establish a balance between facilitating clients’ legitimate transactions and guarding against potentially illegal ones.

“The work of the compliance department is more important now, and bank management appreciates that,” he said, saying that the resentment that bankers used to have against compliance officers— often perceived as wet blankets who tended to veto lucrative bank deals—was slowly evolving toward greater cooperation.

Despite all these efforts, however, the Abcomp chief warns that the Philippine banking system continues to face threats on the horizon including sustained efforts of unknown third parties to conduct hacking and cyber attacks on the country’s increasingly automated financial network.

“The threat is real and continuing, so we cannot let our guard down,” Fuentes said.

Interestingly, the Abcomp official’s point about always being on guard is echoed by Deguito when asked about she would have done differently when she first had to deal with the Bangladeshi funds.

“You have to trust yourself before anyone else,” she said, ruing efforts to paint her as the mastermind of the elaborate laundering scheme. “Why is it just myself [being blamed]? I was a dutiful employee. I just trusted people too much.”

And as she reflects on the changes in the local banking industry which she helped precipitate, Deguito notes that the disruption in her personal life is just as real.

“I have no work, and my life is very domesticated,” she said, admitting to feeling frustrated early on. “But I harbor no hard feelings against the other people involved. I’m very at peace.”

More importantly, she can now venture outdoors to public places like shopping malls, unlike a few months ago when she feared for her physical safety.

“Some people even ask to have selfies taken with me,” Deguito said.