Learning from BPI

The Bank of the Philippine Islands did it again with the opening of the Philippines’ first-ever museum within a bank last Monday by no less than Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and Mayor Michael Rama together with BPI Chair Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala and BPI  president and CEO Aurelio Montinola III. The ceremony was  witnessed by over 200 bank senior officers and high-end clients.  This is the 17th in the list of firsts for the bank, which turned 160 years last Aug. 1. I am a biased source when it comes to heaping praise on the museum because I was part of its unfolding and so I shall not dwell on its merits for obvious reasons.

Let me instead reveal this bank’s secrets to being  able to set up a museum in just eight months—and I am not even referring to the availability of funds.
BPI has several secrets up its sleeve that made this and its future plans to set up other branch museums elsewhere, possible.

One secret has to do with managers and senior officers with a zest for heritage. For Cebu, they had Carlos “Caloy” Apuhin, senior manager of BPI Mango Branch, who began keeping mementos and many of the vintage bank equipment from the moment he rose to the ranks. The bonanza came when he was assigned as manager of BPI Magallanes, right where the BPI Museum Cebu rose, which brings me to the second and related secret.

The 150th anniversary celebration of the bank in 2001 also helped because the head office in Makati celebrated it by opening an exhibition that required all older branches to scour their storerooms to submit at least one vintage equipment, cash safe or document. A Bacolod branch manager, for example, sent a 1930s wood-paneled art deco Simplex “bundy-type” clock. The manager of the Kalibo Branch also sent word that the original 1897 cash safe sent by BPI to its first branch in Iloilo was still being used by them as this had been transferred to Kalibo when it opened in 1974. The precious banknotes, including the pioneering 10 Pesos Fuertes with serial number 0001,  had also been kept assiduously by bank officers in Makati.

Stories like these warm the heart, especially when one gets ahold of them, which exactly happened to me as the days in the run-up to the opening ensued.

Moreover and unbeknown to many, above the high ceiling of the BPI Magallanes ground floor is a huge second floor space where so many bank equipment, some dating to right after World War II, had been kept. The same branch also has a mezzanine where voluminous documents and more equipment were kept and inventoried year after year, including so many versions of the 1940 and 1950s Burroughs accounting machines and comptometers, gargantuan Olivetti divisumma and multisumma calculators, typewriters of various brands and the dinosaur of them all, the huge NCR Post-tronic machine which needs six people to barely lift it into place—and there are three of them still on storage!

The lesson to be learned from all this is that if one plans to stay in business for so long, one will eventually need to show something for it as technology and the mind-set of the future generations begin to change in leaps and bounds. And the best way to do this is to stop auctioning off by lots all those old equipment or burning off all those bundles of documents.

At BPI, thus, finding what to display was a walk in the park. “Let’s make it easy” is BPI’s present slogan. My experience curating the exhibition for their first-ever museum is without an iota of doubt, a testament to this.

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BPI Museum Cebu is currently finalizing its museum admissions policy. For the moment. admission to the museum is by appointment only.