RCBC draws road map to growth
After a challenging period in the last three years, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. has drawn up a road map to reclaim a formidable standing among local banks, aiming to sustain a double-digit profit growth, grow its balance sheet by 20 percent annually for the next five years and use digital platforms to broaden customer base.
Under the leadership of Eugene Acevedo, who will assume the post of chief executive officer starting July 1, RCBC also plans to trim expenses while improving productivity and jack up its consumer and small and medium enterprise (SME) lending business.
In the second half of this year, RCBC also intends to boost its war chest by returning to the offshore bond market with a possible $300-million offering as well as tap the local market with a P5-billion offering. This is assuming that the market remains conductive, which RCBC expects it will be, according to RCBC treasurer and senior executive vice president Horacio Cebrero III.
If there’s an opportunity, Cebrero said RCBC might also issue long-term negotiable certificates of deposit.
Despite another P2-billion loan-loss provisioning planned to cover its exposure to bankrupt Korean shipbuilder Hanjin, Acevedo said “we’ll probably track our performance in the first quarter” when asked for guidance for the full year.
In the first three months, RCBC grew its net profit by 15 percent year-on-year to P1.3 billion on higher net interest earnings and trading gains.
Cebrero added that RCBC would likely grow its loan book by the low teens this year.
RCBC ended March with P665 billion in resources. Growing this by 20 percent yearly be difficult to do taking only the organic route, Acevedo said. “We are on the lookout for acquisition targets but they have to be along the lines of SME and consumer loans, consistent with our strategy,” he said.
RCBC would like the SME and consumer sectors to account for 50 percent of its total loan book from 38 percent at present.
“In the last three years, RCBC has had a difficult time, we’ve been subjected to stricter rules, we had to redefine our procedures—often regressively and often the subject of false information or basically rumors. It was difficult for us to build our deposit book. In fact our casa (low-cost current account/savings account deposits) went down in the first year and a half,” Acevedo said.
He was referring to the aftermath of the $81-million money-laundering scandal that involved the bank’s Jupiter branch.
“The good news is (deposit base) that has recovered, so the plan moving forward is for the bank to start climbing the ranks, hopefully reach the position where we were five years ago. How are we going to do that? The main opportunity in the economy is the growing middle class and the growing SME that supports the middle class,” he said. In the years ahead, apart from focusing on cost-efficiency, productivity and improving customer coverage and experience, Acevedo said RCBC’s digital transformation would likely gain traction in the next three years. Using digital channels, RCBC’s “moonshot” goal is to reach a customer base of 65 million Filipinos from less than two million at present. RCBC has hired Lito Villanueva, formerly managing director of PLDT’s fintech arm Voyager Innovations, and Marita Bueno, a data scientist and analytics expert, to boost its digital transformation. “Our approach to digital transformation is the understanding that he battleground of the future is customer experience. It’s not about us; it’s about the customers,” Acevedo said.
