LARRY HOWAI

I NOTED with sadness the recent passing of a pioneer in the banking industry, Philip Rochford.

As I am currently travelling, I was unable to attend his funeral service, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the tremendous contribution that Rochford made to the financial services industry in TT.

The National Commercial Bank, of which he was the managing director, was formed in 1970, following the Black Power disturbances in the early part of that year.

Cyril Duprey, that pioneer of our local insurance industry who gave birth to Clico, was appointed as chairman and Rochford was appointed as the first managing director. Rochford's mandate was to develop an institution that could rival the foreign banks, which until that time had a monopoly on the economy.

It was a time of much upheaval, as our nation had gained independence just eight years earlier and was now charting a way forward.

Rochford took on the challenge of building that bank and, by 1985, had nurtured it into one of the major financial institutions in the country, with a network of 23 branches and over 200,000 customers.

He also formed the first merchant bank in TT, the International Industrial Merchant Bank (a joint venture with Banque de Paris et de Pays Bas) and acquired 100 per cent of the shares of Trinfinance, a partly-owned subsidiary of Citibank.

These two initiatives gave a view of his vision to ensure that the financial services sector of the economy could play a positive and proactive role in the industrial development of the nation. He also acquired the branches of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which around that time had decided to pull out of TT.

His focus on development was not just on the physical expansion of the banking group that he had spearheaded but, very critically, on the growth of the people whom he saw as taking forward his vision for the future. He made a very significant investment in people. He transformed his training centre into a learning resource centre and made a significant investment in establishing its presence in Chaguanas.

I believe that he would say that his focus on the development of his people was his biggest success, and today several financial institutions and the nation as a whole are benefiting from that investment.

In 1986, the economy which had experienced the oil boom of the 1970s went into recession with the collapse of oil prices and, as businesses failed and government expenditure dried up, financial institutions became challenged.

The non-bank financial houses (such as SWAIT, Summit Finance and a number of others) fell first and the local/indigenous banks also faced challenges - the indigenous banks being the Trinidad Cooperative Bank (TCB), which was formed by locals in 1914, and the Workers Bank (WB), which was formed by an intervention by then prime minister Dr Eric Williams in 1970.

In that same year the National Commercial Bank was formed when the assets of the Bank