Roberto ‘Bobby’ de Ocampo has earned the reputation of ‘Mr. Fix It’ over the years for delivering effective solutions to many of the country’s major challenges. He fixed rural electrification in the 1970s, the Development Bank of the Philippines in the 1980s, the Philippine economy in the 1990s and the Philippine Veterans Bank’s legacy today.
Veterans Bank was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2013 when former Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Amando Tetangco Jr. and former Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima tried to convince de Ocampo to resuscitate the bank. Although reluctant at first, de Ocampo, a son of a World War II veteran, later accepted the offer and implemented major changes within the legacy bank.
“And this year, finally after changes, governance and processes, this bank is going to have its first record-breaking profit. And it will keep going on,” de Ocampo says in an interview at the headquarters of the privately-owned Veterans Bank in Makati City.
“I am on my fifth year in this bank and it is going to have a record profit. In fact by the end of this year, I could say we are either No. 2 or No. 1 in terms of return on equity among all banks,” says the 73-year-old former Finance Secretary and former president of the Asian Institute of Management.
De Ocampo hopes to turn Veterans Bank into a universal bank in five years by building up its capital. The bank has about P5 billion in capital today which needs to increase to P10 billion to attain the ‘unibank’ status. “We are in the process of capital raising. I am hoping to get P2 billion within the next two years and the rest will follow if we continue to be profitable,” he says.
Universal bank
Veterans Bank has about P55 billion in deposits at present, after one local government unit deposited P5 billion recently, which de Ocampo says is “an indicator of the renewed confidence that they have with this bank”.
The turnaround of Veterans Bank speaks of de Ocampo’s ability to fix major problems that earned him various local and international recognitions. He is the only Filipino knighted by three states”•the UK, France and the Vatican. He is also the first and only Filipino elected as member of the Trilateral Commission and member of the board of the Global Reporting Initiative, both powerful global bodies.
Beyond being an economist and banker, he has a black belt in tae kwon do and is a champion golfer with more than 80 trophies and a record five holes-in-one. He is also a classical guitar player.
He is the only Filipino to have served as chairman of all three official government depository banks”•Land Bank of the Philippines, Development Bank of the Philippines and the Veterans Bank.
De Ocampo has learned from his father to be the best at what he does. In school, he was known as “the guy who gets the gold medal”. He studied at San Beda College in preschool, De La Salle University in elementary and high school and Ateneo de Manila University in college before pursuing graduate studies at the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics.
“My father was a very relentless worker. Probably I got a lot of the inspiration for working hard and trying to achieve from him. As a result, I was always kind of driven to do as well as I could in anything starting with academics,” he says.
His father was a lawyer who became a guerilla during World War 2. After the war, his father became a salesman and later worked for DBP and the Central Bank.
“I came from a family of veterans, meaning to say I was born just as the war was ending. Manila was completely devastated. I had an older brother who was born on the day that the major bombings and killings were taking place on Feb. 12, 1945. My father was a guerilla and so was my uncle who actually became the head of the Veterans Federation and one of the original founders of Veterans Bank,” he says.
Family of veterans
His father’s role was to infiltrate the Japanese military headquarters and get as much intelligence on their military plans which he passed on to other guerillas and the forces of American Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
“My father nearly got caught and killed,” says de Ocampo. “He got married while the war was going on to a daughter of the first Customs commissioner whose name was Melencio Fabros. So my middle name is Fabros.”
“I grew up in the middle of a devastated city. We were not exactly rich people. My first years were in a ramshackle house in Calle Trabajo, Sta. Mesa. That’s where I grew up until I was six years old. Then my parents strived hard enough to build a house at a residential area called Morningside Terrace across Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Sta. Mesa,” he says.
When a flash flood inundated half of their house in 1958, his parents decided to relocate to Greenhills in San Juan just as his father’s career was advancing as a lawyer and then as a businessman.
“In 1965, we moved to Greenhills. At that time, we were probably the first of three houses there. EDSA was Highway 54 then. From our house, you could see the fields all the way to the fence of the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club,” he says.
De Ocampo was a consistent topnotcher despite being the youngest in his high school class at La Salle which included the likes of Jose Cuisia Jr. who would become Central Bank governor and Ramon del Rosario Jr. who would become Finance secretary in the early 1990s.
“I had just graduated from La Salle and figuring out what to do. I was 15 years old when I got out of high school. All of my classmates were taking LIA-COM in La Salle which means Liberal Arts and Commerce. I was not interested in it,” he says.
“I started to look for something more. Interestingly, Economics was being offered by Ateneo. It had to do with what you do with the country’s economy. It appealed to me a lot more than selling stuff. Since La Salle was not offering it at that time, I switched to Ateneo,” he says.
“Believe it or not, that was not my inclination for a career. I wanted to become a doctor. There is something about my psyche. I wanted to help people. It is more important to have a meaningful life than to have a profitable one. That’s always in my head somehow,” says de Ocampo.
In Ateneo, de Ocampo met students like Prospero Nograles who would become House speaker, Mike Arroyo who would marry the future President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Carlos Dominguez III who would become secretary of Agriculture and later Finance.
After college, he had a brief stint at PCI Bank, but the routine job bored him. “I was not challenged enough. So I switched to SGV which was a lot more challenging. It was the first time I ever worked on a Good Friday, thanks to SGV,” he says.
Then, he started applying for schools abroad. He enrolled in the University of Michigan where he met Rene Cayetano who was finishing his Master’s in Law and who would later become a member of the Ramos Cabinet and a senator.
Finishing his Master’s in Business Administration did not fulfill his dream, though. “It did not quite make me happy, so I started scouting for something else and lo and behold, the London School of Economics was offering a combination of post-graduate offering of Economic Development and Public Administration in one package,” he says.
“I applied and got accepted. When I returned here, in a sense, I followed more the economic development path that I learned from the London School of Economics than the Business Administration path that I learned from the Graduate School of Michigan,” he says.
Graduate degrees
Armed with all these prestigious degrees, de Ocampo could have easily become a top official in large conglomerates, but he wanted more than the glamor of being a corporate executive. “So I came back here looking for challenge and I ended up in rural electrification. For me, it is like a hands-on Ph.D. Like many people born and raised in Manila, the only thing I saw outside Manila was maybe Baguio and some beaches in Batangas,” he says.
He was 29 and newly-married when he helped establish the National Electrification Administration. He was a part of a small team that also included former Col. Gregorio Vigilar who would later become the secretary of Public Works. De Ocampo would become the youngest administrator of NEA.
“At that time, only 30 percent of the country had electricity. I had to sleep in friendly barangay neighbors on a bamboo bed or banig on it, but that was exactly the kind of adventure I was looking for. As a result, I ended up seeing every nook and cranny of the Philippines because of rural electrification. If you look at the map of the Philippines and throw a dart, wherever it lands I have been there in all likelihood. It has been an interesting adventure for me,” he says.
The NEA program would later become the model of the rural electrification program for developing countries. At 29, de Ocampo whose wife was pregnant with the first of their four children became one of the 1975 Ten Outstanding Young Men awardees in the field of national economic development. Other awardees at that time included Lino Brocka for Arts, Christian Monsod for Finance and Emil Javier for Agriculture.
De Ocampo stayed at NEA for seven years through Martial Law. “Somewhere along the line, Martial Law started taking a turn that was not quite hunky-dory…I thought I was only in my 30s at that time and I did not want to be typecast. So I sent in my application to the World Bank, and they said come in. My wife, however, was not exactly thrilled with the idea of living in a foreign country,” he says.
The family moved to Washington D.C., the headquarters of the World Bank, where his four children”•two boys and two girls—were born. “I was paid in dollars, tax-free. They gave free education to my kids. I was given a set of other countries in the Middle East as my area of responsibility,” he says.
At the World Bank, he became the first Filipino senior country officer whose role was to raise funds for the International Development Association which provides soft window or concessional loans to developing countries.
“I thought this was it. I was comfortably earning dollars, I could go shopping all the time, and I could retire with a nice pension. Then Marcos got ousted. I was in the middle of discussion about some country program when I got a phone call from [former Vice President Emmanuel] Pelaez and later from Jobo [Central Bank Governor Jose Fernandez],” he says.
Pressured to return to the country by the economic team of the newly installed Aquino administration, de Ocampo did not say yes right away and it took a year of cajoling before he gave in to the call. “After a while, I said I would do it on a leave-of-absence basis from the World Bank for two years. So I came back and left my family there in 1987. I was asked to revive the rural electrification program and while I was doing that for about a year, all of a sudden, they asked me to go to DBP and help fix that up too,” he says.
De Ocampo thought the offer would result in a conflict of interest because DBP, where his father also served as vice chairman, was one of the borrowers of the World Bank. “I was made the vice-chairman, with Jess Estanislao as chairman. I had to either give up World Bank or DBP. Along came my calculation of excitement and historical stuff and challenges and I told my wife I could not possibly pass this historical opportunity up. So I resigned from the World Bank,” he says.
Youngest DBP chairman
When Estanislao was transferred to the National Economic and Development Authority, then President Corazon Aquino named de Ocampo as the chairman of DBP. During his term at DBP as the youngest chairman and CEO, he transformed the bank into the world’s second soundest and third best performing Bank in 1991, as acknowledged by The Banker magazine.
When then Defense Secretary President Fidel Ramos decided to run for president in 1992, he asked de Ocampo to become his economic adviser. “I guess he had already seen me operate. He asked me to be his economic adviser when he was still planning to run for president. I used to write sections of his campaign speeches,” says de Ocampo.
After Ramos won as president, de Ocampo did not want to join the Cabinet as he wanted to focus on DBP. He recommended Ramon de Rosario for the post of DOF secretary first, then Ernest Leung.
When the president took him to a golf game at Wack Wack in the middle of a downpour, it took Ramos nine holes to bring up the subject matter of the DOF post. De Ocampo said he would think about it.
“I was pretty comfortable with DBP. I was able to reform it to be acknowledged by the Banker Magazine as the world’s soundest bank. Besides, my father was vice chairman of DBP. Even though we had no ownership of it, it makes my father proud, not to mention I knew the corruption in BIR and Customs. So I said I would think about it,” he says.
“I was taking a vacation in Washington when one night while sleeping, the phone rang. When I picked up the phone, it was President Ramos who asked me not turn him down this time. What was I supposed to do? So I said yes and I talked to him about what my key plan was,” says de Ocampo.
At the DOF, he introduced the comprehensive tax reform program which brought the country’s fiscal position from large deficits to the longest period of consecutive years of fiscal surpluses.
“I ended up with the first surplus ever, and it went on and on for my entire tenure which was five and a half years. And then, fortunately towards the end, when the financial crisis hit, we were the least affected by the Asian financial crisis,” he says.
Under de Ocampos’s term, the government reached the highest tax collection efficiency ratio ever at 17 percent of the gross domestic product. “The average in our part of the world at that time was 15 percent. Ours was only 9 percent, and we could not even get to 10 percent. During my time, it hit 17 percent and that record has not yet been matched,” he says.
For turning the government’s budget position around, de Ocampo was awarded the Global Finance Minister of the Year in 1995 by Euromoney and Asian Finance Minister of the Year in 1996 and 1997 by Euromoney and Asiamoney, respectively. He received the Philippine Legion of Honor in 1998.
De Ocampo also served as the chairman of the APEC and ASEAN Finance Ministers and governor of the World Bank, IMF and ADB during his term as Finance Secretary.
After his stint in DOF, de Ocampo spent time with his family and did some part-time consulting because the law prevents a Cabinet secretary from joining any company for a year, “When the year was over, I was offered by companies to join them, but there is something in me that does not like to be a trophy employee. I ended up accepting an offer to be the president of AIM which contributes to society and education. There, I am not making anybody rich materially and that is why I went for it,” he says.
De Ocampo became president of AIM for six years and retired until he was 60 to “set an example by not asking for an extension.”
After retirement, he was preparing to travel abroad with his wife, but he received multiple offers from companies, here and abroad, to become a board chairman or director. “As a result, until now, I sit on about 30 different boards, seven of which are outside the Philippines,” he says.
De Ocampo is the first Filipino and Asian to be elected to the board of the Global Reporting Initiative which is the international authority for sustainability based in Amsterdam. He is also the only Filipino in one of the highest level think tanks called Trilateral Commission whose other members include Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan.
“Because independent directors became a must, a lot of companies have invited me to be an independent director and I chair some companies. It keeps me busy, but then in 2013, the big Malaysian bank CIMB was in negotiations with Ramon Ang of San Miguel for buying out the majority chunk of Bank of Commerce,” he says.
CIMB approached de Ocampo to be the chairman should the deal push through. The two sides were negotiating for the acquisition and he was just waiting for a notification once the deal was finalized. “Instead, I got a call from them saying the deal was off,” he says.
“Prior to this, both Purisima and Tetangco kept telling me to fix Veterans Bank but I kept turning them down partly because at that time I was sitting in the board of RCBC which I left because I was supposed to be the chairman of Bank of Commerce. So this time, I had no more excuse not to say yes to fixing Veterans Bank. That was July or August of 2013,” he recalls.
“I just told the two of them [Tetangco and Purisima] you have to back me up because I would probably be draconian. I might revamp the whole board. That’s exactly what I did. Of course, I did not do it instantly but even on the first year, it was practically a different board,” he says.
De Ocampo selected new board members who are experts in the banking and governance sectors. “I’d like to tell people if you compare my board to biggest banks here, it is probably one of the best boards you could think of,” he says.
The Vetarans Bank’s board now includes four former bank officials such as Jose Nunez Jr. who was chairman of DBP, Gerardo Anonas who was president of DBP, Francisco Magsajo Jr. who was president of RCBC and Cesar Africa Rubio who was executive vice president of Planters Bank.
The board also includes former Labor Secretary Nieves Confesor who was the first woman dean of AIM, former Isla Lipana & Co. chairperson Judith Lopez and Guillermo Parayno who is widely acknowledged as the best Customs and BIR commissioner.
“When I came here, I decided to articulate a vision of the bank and I said we are going to resort to ‘guerilla banking’. We have a niche of veterans, but we have to expand that niche to the entire military establishment. We don’t want to announce all over the place. I prefer that we get it done first like guerrillas by identifying your targets and finding out you markets,” he says.
Future of banking
De Ocampo also plans to bring the future of banking to Veterans Bank. “I found out we had only 60 branches. In my mind, banking would go digital so why waste my money building little buildings all over the place when it is going to be obsolete. So I stuck with 60. I said we are going to be the bank for the military as the core niche. And so we have been developing it along the core niche,” he says.
He ordered the refurbishing of the bank branches to proudly reflect the gallantry and heroism shown by Filipino heroes and veterans. The bank is now servicing the pension loan portfolio of the military, which increased dramatically from P100 million one and a half years ago to P3 billion this year.
De Ocampo is also active in promoting cultural and economic relations with other countries. He was conferred “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” for promoting Philippine-UK relations and being the chairman of the British Alumni Association and was named Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor for promoting links between France and the Philippines in the economic domain.
He continues to share insightful solutions to fix the country’s major problems such as the traffic congestion plaguing Metro Manila. De Ocampo, however, is more optimistic today, believing that the Philippines will be among the major economies that will shape the future.
“We are the second fastest growing economy in this part of the world. I agree with the combination of tax reforms and ‘Build, Build, Build’infrastructure program to sustain economic growth,” he says.
“Even in the eyes of the Word Bank, we are a country that is approaching the demographic sweet spot because our average age is still young. We are the most adept now at customer service. We are less of an assembly line population than a service-oriented population. When it comes to services, we are unbeatable,” he says.
De Ocampo, who was consulted by incumbent Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III on tax reforms, says the Philippines enjoys a very good credit rating which can possibly reach the ideal ‘A’ score once infrastructure projects are built and the tax effort further improves. “We are in a pretty good situation,” he says.
