BOHOL Tour Packages! - Panglao Beach Resorts, Chocolate Hills, River Cruise, Island Hopping from low P4500+ only from www.Bohol-Philippines.com

The Philippine National Bank

The Philippine National Bank is one of the oldest banking institutions in the Philippines. It has been a known and respected institution in the entire Philippines for almost one hundred years.

The bank provides also provides financial services that cater to very specific needs of Filipinos abroad. The bank has several branches in the United States, the Middle east, Europe and the Asia Pacific.

The bank was established as a government-owned banking institution on July 22, 1916, with its head office at Escolta, Manila, the country's former financial capital. The bank's primary mandate was to provide financial services to Philippine industry and agriculture and support the government's economic development effort.

When World War I was being fought at Europe, the Philippines' major exports such as sugar and copra, Manila hemp and tobacco, were in high demand. However, producers didn't have enough resources to produce more and develop the production techniques. To address this issue, Henderson Martin, Vice Governor of the Philippines, together with Mr. Miguel Cuaderno (who later became Central Bank governor) drafted the charter for a national bank. On February 4, 1916, the Philippine legislature passed Public Act 2612 to provide for the establishment of the PNB, replacing the small P1 million government-owned Agricultural Bank.

Mr. H. Parker Willis, an American, was PNB's first president. Willis once wrote for the prestigious US-based Journal of Commerce (JoC), and in 1912 he became executive director of the US National Monetary Commission. Under Willis' direction, the commission issued a study recommending creation of a U.S. central bank.

After the creation of PNB, the bank became the Philippine's Central Bank.

With PNB's establishment, Filipinos finally had a bank of their own. With authorization from the government, PNB started to grant short and long-term loans to agriculture and industry. Way back then, peasants could avail of loans with interest between 8% to 10% annual interest. PNB was then also authorized to function as a retail bank that received deposits. It was also allowed to open foreign credits and rediscount bills. The PNB was given the power to issue circulating notes. With all these, the PNB became the Philippine's de-facto Central Bank. PNB was the country's Central Bank until 1949.

The evolution of PNB was marked with breakthroughs. PNB launched the first on-line Electronic Data Processing System in the entire Far East". From 1967 and 1979, the bank expanded and started operating in London, Singapore, Jakarta, Honolulu and Amsterdam. Locally, the bank opened 14 provincial branches. In 1917, the bank started its Dollar Remittance Program. The Dollar Remittance Program was designed for overseas Filipinos to enable them to send funds to their loved ones in the Philippines. The bank's first local branch was setup in Ilo-ilo in 1917. The New York branch was setup in the same year. The China branch opened in 1918.

In 1989, the privatization of the bank started to materialize. In 1989, Philippine National Bank offered thirty per cent of its outstanding stocks in an IPO and thus was listed in the stock exchange in 1989. In 1992, PNB was the first ever Philippine bank who's assets scaled the P100 billion mark. In early 2000, the Lucio Tan Group became the bank's largest single private stockholder.

PNB has invested to keep up with the pace of Internet Banking. At present, the bank features the PNB Corporate Internet Banking (CIB) System. The CIB is a system that enables clients to manage their corporate finances over the Internet. The CIB enables a company to assign its employees specific access to the system, thus increasing the system's flexibility and power.

Philippine National Bank was in the red for several years after the year 2000 but it has long rebounded from the issues that hounded it. PNB still remains as one of the largest banks in the country, providing a broad list of of products and services that cater to the varying needs of its clients.