AT Manila’s bustling China Town in the 1980s, Ernesto R. Alberto was a young man evaluating the cost benefit of changing an entire fleet of armored cars and checking randomly the ledger of the day’s peso, dollar and yen computations. Fast-forward almost three decades later, he is now an executive of one of the Philippines’s most profitable listed companies.
Well clad with a suit and a pocket square, Ernesto—or Eric as he is known by his friends—just came from a meeting with the big boss of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), the man whom they regard as their MVP—a play on Manuel V. Pangilinan’s initials—or the most valuable player.
Gathering his thoughts, Eric takes a sip on his first glass of Chardonnay in a café in Makati City, and began telling his story.
Banker at 25
“I was a young bank manager for Equitable Banking Corp. in Binondo when I was 25. It was 1986, a very significant period in Philippine history that opened up the country to the rest of the world,” he said.
His vocabulary back then consisted of the terms borrowing, liquidity, loans and interest rates. After all, a bank manager must be well versed in lending terms and policies.
He was a protégé of then-Far East Bank and Trust Co. Chairman Jose B. Fernandez—whom he fondly calls Jobo—in his early 20s, when he started his banking career as a credit and investment analyst.
“Early in my career, I really admired the late Central Bank Governor and Far East Bank Chairman Jobo Fernandez for his intelligence and bearing. I liked the way he dresses up, the way he speaks and his demeanor was very classical. When I was younger, I wanted to be like him. He is a very formidable man with a very good reputation,” Eric said.
He always wanted to become a successful banker, Eric, who graduated with flying colors from San Beda College in Manila with a degree in Economics, said. A career in banking, he explained, gave him a branding of being a dignified man.
“It was a very dignified career, as it is the most apolitical job out there. Banking brands you as a very trustworthy person. You cannot be corrupt in the banking profession. You must be trustworthy because you will be entrusted with people’s money. As you go up the corporate ladder in banking, you will be entrusted with keys to those funds,” he said.
Banking also gave him a good reason to dress up nicely, he quickly quipped.
‘GQ’
“If you are single and you want to impress girls you must dress up, right? So it was very important for me to buy back issues of GQ then show it to my tailor, who copies the dress for me,” Eric said.
He recalled that he used to date a lot of pretty ladies in his mid-20s, when life was still as simple as pie. Though he was a little cautious with the people he interacted with—fearing that a son of a politico or a military man would play the death game with him—he remained very friendly with many people.
“My crowning point was when I became a vice president of a bank at 28,” Eric said.
‘Sayote’ pie and the economic standstill
Coming from a family of nine—six siblings and two lawyers for parents—Eric lived a modest lifestyle.
He has no other choice, though, as Manila was practically closed to foreign money with the martial rule in place.
“The population was polarized back then. It was an era of belt tightening, paired with a ban on importation of nonessential things, as there was really nothing much to import with a negative balance of trade and payment. There was not much choice in the market,” Eric said.
One such incident that proved that modesty was the norm back then was his family’s Christmas pie.
“People became very innovative because of the situation. I remembered that instead of an apple pie, my mother baked us sayote pie for Christmas,” he recalled. “We had to resort to local clothes, which were sewn by local tailors that filled the need for clothing. It’s lamentable that today, a lot of microbusinesses like these have collapsed.”
The local economy back then was at a standstill and normal people lived with little on their pockets, while politically connected people were squandering around, enjoying while their poor brethren suffered.
“Despite an economic standstill, the Filipino spirit was still alive. There where discos in every five-star hotel in the Philippines; and at your 20s, that’s where you go,” Eric said. “People still had fun, but life was much simpler.”
The 52-year-old executive remembered that the heydays of the disco scene in the Philippines were concentrated on a specific strip in Makati City.
The discos where he used to spend his nights in were now replaced with other establishments, but he will never forget their beauty and character.
Speaking in hushed tones, Eric remembered his fear of being peppered with bullets at a disco should he earn the ire of a politically connected man. He quickly returned to his normal voice, after realizing that he has been afforded with the freedom of speech for quite a few decades now.
“I was young at 25 in a marketplace where there was not only political, but also economic turmoil. No one would support a country that defaulted in its loans. In the 1980s, when I was still a young bank manager, Central Bank Governor Jobo Fernandez, had to float T-bills just to keep the economy afloat and keep liquidity intact, because there was capital flight with interest rates of over 40 percent,” he recalled.
It was also in the 1980s when Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., known as Ninoy, was shot at Manila’s international gateway, stirring up the fire in the Filipino people to stage the largest peaceful protest in 1986 that ousted President Ferdinand Marcos.
Edsa veteran
Eric was there—by accident and by choice. He lived just a few kilometers away from Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa), where the People Power Revolution broke out. “I remember that I was in my girlfriend’s house in Alabang, and I heard the news. On my way back, there was a crowd, so I managed to get there. Every day that my brother and I went, the crowd grew in number. It was frightening when the military was instructed to intervene,” he said.
A few years after the lifting of the martial rule, Eric transferred to Citytrust Banking Corp., married his girlfriend at the time and built a family of four with her.
Contribution at 25
“Maybe my contribution to the world when I was 25—when I was still in corporate banking—was that I channeled loans to fund working capital of fledging companies. It was a personal victory, and that is how I built relationships and friends,” he said.
The executive admits that he has a soft spot for entrepreneurs, who, he said, are the cornerstone and the bedrock of an emerging economy.
“We need to empower and enable them to grow further,” he said. “The loans that I approved when I was 25 were the good deed that I have done for them, and that’s all that matters.”
From bills to the Cloud
AFTER his two-decade stint in the banking sector, Eric was convinced by his colleagues to fill in a seat at the country’s largest telecommunications player, PLDT.
“In 2003, my colleagues from Citibank, Ricky Vargas and Annabel Chua, recommended me to MVP and brought me to fill in a corporate business head. I was into corporate relations banking back then, so they thought that I have the right background and network to head the corporate business group of PLDT,” he said.
Today, Eric has the know-hows and the expertise to the latest in technology, from innovations such as the ever-so-complex cloud to the concept of Big Data. He is, among more than 20 hats, the president of ePLDT Inc., the information and communications technology arm of the telecommunications titan.
“What I had when I joined PLDT was just barebones management orientation. I moved when I was 42 years old, when I still had a lot of energy; and I’m glad I did. I don’t think I will have the same amount of energy and patience to take on such a drastic shift in careers. I did it at the time when I already have the maturity and seasoning to do so. If I jumped earlier, I won’t have the maturity—and seasoning—and the exposure to take on a task like that,” he explained.
Shifting careers, he said, allowed him to gain more perspective in life.
“In banking, you can never be a maverick; but in technology, you should not be risk-averse, else you will be left behind,” Eric said. “You have to have the balance of both.”
In more than a decade in managing subsidiaries of the telecommunications giant, Eric learned that adjusting to the latest trends and fads in the tech scene is a constant, as they come every six months to a year.
“The beauty of technology [that] is every six months to a year, things change; so you are all on a clean slate after. Hence, it takes a lot of self-diligence and studying to keep pace with the new trends in technology and make them to something commercially distributable,” he said.
His work today involves selling to corporations—from large ones to the microenterprises—solutions that help them improve the efficiency of their work through certain tech products, both physical and digital.
Untarnished inheritance
Eric’s salary might be as high as the sky, as proven by the education of his two daughters and his only son, who are all studying in prestigious schools around the globe. Despite this, he likes to believe that he has not changed much.
He learned this value from his parents, who had to help each other out to give their seven children the best education, to bring food on the table and to dress them decently.
“We were not poor, but we were not rich. My mother just knew her priorities. Education was paramount, then food and the last is the way we dressed up in public,” he said.
These, Eric said, are what he inherited from his parents that he would also like to pass on to his children, stressing on the need to teach them financial prudence and integrity. “I don’t spoil my kids, which, I guess, is part of tough love,” he said. “They must learn to be financially prudent despite the blessings that we currently enjoy.”
He recalled that he was able to instill this value to one of his daughters when she asked Eric to buy a $4,000 Chanel bag while they were on holiday in Europe.
“I didn’t buy her the bag that she wanted and I explained why. I told her that if I bought the bag myself, then I am robbing her of the joy of getting things from her own effort,” he said. “She understood, but quickly quipped: ‘How much would one of my kidney’s cost? Would it suffice for the bag?’ And I just laughed.”
Eric knew how it felt to be successful without the help of his family’s wealth. This, he said, allows a person to have a sense of fulfillment in life.
“The blessings that I have had all came from blood, sweat and tears. They gave me a sense of fulfillment, and I hope my kids will also feel the same,” he said.
Despite being a car junkie—his iPad Air contains a lot of pictures of high-end cars—Eric said he remains prudent in his finances because he believes that one should not necessarily inflate his lifestyle with the increase in income.
“Millennials must learn to stick to their values—the simple values that they learned when they were young. They must not change themselves, particularly at how they deal with people, just because they have higher income,” he stressed. “They must also learn the value of integrity in all ways possible, even the integrity to admit who they really are.”
He also advised the youth of today to constantly seek themselves to find out the aspects of life that they should not change.
“The secret to life is finding the few things that you will never compromise on, like being honest and playing fair,” Eric said.
Everything is fleeting
ERIC has at least a decade, or at most two, before he retires from work. As much as he would like to continue earning, life, he said, does not circle around material things, much less around titles.
“At the end of this long, hard career, the titles are temporary. I’d appreciate a continuous income, like building a nest egg; but the titles, I know very well from day one, these are just temporary. At the end of the day, the life that you lived with your family and friends—the relationships that you built—that’s all that matters,” he said.
“These are all means, not the end, means to living, but it is not about living,” Eric added.
He sipped on his last glass of Chardonnay that night, his eyes gleaming after the nostalgia of remembering when he roamed the frenzied streets of Binondo, memories that were kept for more than two decades.