Ana Aboitiz-Delgado embraces the art of banking

Ana Maria Aboitiz-Delgado

Ana Maria Aboitiz-Delgado initially planned to pursue a career in the arts, before eventually deciding to work at her family’s banking business.

So when asked how she would paint her life right now, Aboitiz-Delgado—a fifth generation heir of the Aboitiz family and also the highest-ranking female member of a powerful business clan dominated by males—said she pictures “a woman with multiple arms doing multiple things at the same time.”

“While I wear many hats, I do feel fulfilled at this stage in my life and positive about it all,” Aboitiz-Delgado, UnionBank senior executive vice president, said in an interview posted on the Youtube channel of UBX, the financial technology arm of the Aboitiz Group’s banking unit.

Her transformation into the powerful woman she is now started in her hometown of Cebu with her family. With a “very supportive” mom, Marian Aboitiz, who pushed her to pursue her passion for art, Aboitiz-Delgado freely explored life to figure out the right career path.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Painting from Boston College. She hated her first accounting class, but “really enjoyed” studying art. In 2010, she obtained her Master’s Degree in Business Administration from New York University Stern School of Business.

“I had enjoyed the arts even prior to college, and so I said, ‘you know, this is maybe the one time in my life I can dedicate studies to the arts,’” she said in the same UBX interview.

“And I had a very supportive mom. She said, ‘we like it, you’re good at it, go into it.’ And my dad also supported the decision to move, so it was kind of following a passion.”

Years later, it was also art that helped her find her way to UnionBank to join the family business. When she came home from the US, her father, the late ambassador Roberto Eduardo “Bobby” Aboitiz, connected her to now UnionBank CEO Edwin Bautista, a marketing guru and art collector.

“He (Bobby Aboitiz) said ‘that was a marketing person, go talk to him.’ And so when I spoke to Edwin actually, my first conversation with him was only about art because he’s an amazing collector,” Aboitiz-Delgado recalled.

“And he said, ‘you know, there are opportunities in product management.’ And I thought if I’m gonna consider and try something outside of the arts, at least product and marketing has a creative aspect,” she added.

“So I said I have nothing to lose. Try it out. And the rest is history.”

At present, Aboitiz-Delgado is also the chief customer experience officer and chief digital channels officer for UnionBank, guiding the company on its digital transformation.

Outside of the boardroom, she is a mother who has this advice to young women: “Understand your strengths, your aspirations, your dreams, and pursue them regardless of what society might think.”

”You have the capacity to write your own story. It’s up to you if you want to include that noise and allow it to affect your route,” she said. INQ