Driving Resilient Growth Amid Global Challenges and Disruption, According to Eugene Acevedo, President & CEO of RCBC

Eugene Acevedo, President and CEO of RCBC, shares valuable lessons on managing crises and transforming an organization for growth.

Growth follows Eugene Acevedo. Throughout his career, whatever bank he has led, growth soon follows. Since taking the leadership of RCBC as President and CEO in 2019, he has led the company to an incredible run that shows no signs of stopping. In just four short years, RCBC has leapfrogged from being the eighth largest privately-owned bank in the Philippines to the fifth largest. It has achieved this feat by growing, on the average, around 6% better than the industry, but what’s more remarkable is that this occurred during a time of crisis–the pandemic years, the tumultuous period emerging from the pandemic, and a time of rapid technological change and disruption. Yet the stellar rise of RCBC is only half the story. Beyond the numbers, it is a story of unquantifiable things: leadership and transformation.

The Business Manual spoke to Eugene Acevedo on a blistering April afternoon at the Yuchengco Tower, RCBC Plaza and shared a conversation about his tremendous success at RCBC, financial inclusion, the transformative power of digital, and championing renewable energy initiatives. At the same time, we also talked about how Acevedo recently became a senior citizen, his memoirs, Never Stand Alone, and how he has been surprised to find fulfillment at the pinnacle of his career.

Beginnings

With a career in banking that spans over 30 years, growth has been one of the hallmarks of Acevedo’s leadership. In 2010-2011, as President and CEO of Philippine National Bank, he propelled the bank's market valuation from USD300 million to an impressive USD1 billion. As Senior Executive Vice President in UnionBank and Chairman at CitySavings, UnionBank's thrift bank subsidiary, he led CitySavings through a period of expansion, with its income skyrocketing five-fold.

This time, at the helm of RCBC, digital banking, financial inclusion, and sustainability are driving the bank to new heights. 

This knack for transformation and growth did not come overnight. The beginnings of Acevedo’s leadership are rooted in an unlikely place: at the University of San Carlos, where he studied Physics. There, despite graduating magna cum laude in his chosen course, Acevedo found himself attracted to other pursuits, leadership in particular.

He recalls his Physics chairman complaining, “Eugene, why are you spending a lot of time with extra-curricular activities when you’re supposed to be studying your books?” He jokes, “They created some sort of degree for me, Bachelor’s in Leadership and minor in Physics.”

This gravitation towards leadership led Acevedo to an MBA at the Asian Institute of Management. It also led him to a career in banking, though for more pragmatic reasons, as Acevedo recalls that only banks such as Cititrust and Far East Bank were hiring during the difficult economic times surrounding the political turmoil of 1986.

Eventually, Acevedo found himself in Citibank where he would spend the next “23 years and 3 days” in a career that would lead him to leadership positions in Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Early on, Acevedo’s Physics training proved to be useful. “It actually became very handy,” he says, “because at around that time, banking became very quantitative. So I spent more than 10 years doing financial derivatives, which was very heavy in mathematics. That was basically where I started my career before I moved on towards lending to corporate and retail customers. And then later on, digital.”

Critically, the training and mentorship Acevedo received at what he calls Citi University shaped his leadership style. “It influenced how I was going to lead going forward,” he says. “And it was always about transformation, about growth, but more importantly, developing the people under me to be much better versions of themselves.”

On Mentorship

At the mention of mentorship, Acevedo talks at length, with a subtle light to his eyes. It becomes obvious that this is a topic that he is passionate about, something that drives his leadership beyond the pursuit of financial growth that he is so good at. Clearly, Eugene Acevedo is first and foremost a leader of people.

“It starts with caring about people,” he explains, “about them as individuals. Each one has his own specific concerns. But beyond that, we need to think about how can they be better at what they do? Look at them, assess what they like doing, what they’re good at, and based on all those evaluations, we train them. We put them through a rigorous training program, and they end up much better than what they were before.”

Acevedo points out that he himself was mentored many times throughout his career, a fact for which he displays much gratitude.

“I was mentored all throughout, and in fact, maybe the first learning is that mentorship works. Banking, generally, and maybe a lot of other professions, are apprenticeship-type organizations. So [you start with] great raw material. You will need to make sure that each young professional who comes in, apart from going through a formal training program, has somebody who watches out for him or her. It happened to me. I had at least a dozen mentors. And before I knew it, I was volunteering to mentor the ones who came after me. It’s a virtuous cycle of mentorship that has produced incredibly talented individuals.”

For Acevedo, the learning never stops. It starts with him at the top and is institutionalized throughout the rest of the organization. Even with an MBA and training from Harvard, Acevedo constantly pursues more learning, taking specialist certificate courses in data science, fintech, AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrency from centers of learning such as Johns Hopkins University, MIT, and Oxford University.

He says, ”I tried to learn as much of the new technology as I could, mostly because I knew that RCBC’s strategy was going to be heavily into digital and data science. I obliged myself to learn as much as I could and then later on made sure that my senior officers and the important officers of the bank went through a similar learning exercise as well.”

Crisis and Opportunity

If it seems that Eugene Acevedo is blessed by the banking gods with good fortune, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, throughout his career, he has had to navigate a maze of financial crises.

He recalls, “Somehow, where I go, I end up with a crisis. I was in Singapore, there was SARS. When I was in Hong Kong running our treasury there in the financial center, we had a global financial crisis. And each one of these crises taught me things, taught me how to manage business, how to take care of people, but more importantly, how to take advantage of the opportunities that each crisis presents.”

He explains that the growth he has achieved occurred not in spite of these crises, but because of them.

“As an investor, a crisis usually results in assets that are severely underpriced. So as a trader, I pick them up during a crisis,” he says. Yet beyond being opportunistic in trading, these crises allowed Acevedo to focus on what matters.

He continues, saying, “Probably the more important thing for entrepreneurs that in a crisis there continues to be some safe sectors to run after. Now in the case of RCBC, during the pandemic, we still grew quite fast. I think on the average we were growing 6% better than the industry. What we did then was we decided there were safe sectors that we could run after, and you know, this was no surprise. The safe sector was our depositors. So we went after them.”

Doubling down on depositors proved to be a golden strategy for RCBC. Acevedo says, “During the crisis we realized that they were the ones we should be taking care of. Because we knew them. Since we knew them, to us they were lower risk. And from a credit scoring standpoint, they were actually three times better than walk-in clients.”

“The thing that happens in a crisis is generally people retreat. And they don’t retreat selectively. They just retreat generally. In RCBC, we decided to retreat a bit, but selectively attack. The other thing we did well was we realized that there was an opportunity in digital banking so we just simply accelerated our digital transformation exercise.”

This RCBC digital transformation led to the bank being named as the Best Digital Bank in the Philippines for four consecutive years by Asiamoney. More importantly, it places RCBC at the forefront of the digital banking revolution.