Nestor Tan, president of Banco de Oro (BDO), a rising star among the Philippines banking sector, enters the room unannounced and unaccompanied. It is a very low-key entrance for the country's boldest and most closely watched financier, whose bank forms part of the famous Filipino conglomerate SM Investments Corp, owned by retail magnate Henry Sy, the country's wealthiest individual.
Through a succession of mergers and acquisitions, the US-educated Mr Tan has transformed BDO from a small savings outfit into a dynamic, growth-hungry universal bank in less than a decade. According to Mr Tan, who spent a chunk of his career at Barclays in the US and UK: "A healthy bank is not one that's conservative - it's one that's progressive." True to this philosophy, he has not shied from transformative deals, the most notable of which came in 2007 with the controversial purchase of Equitable PCI Bank which, as the larger of the two institutions, catapulted BDO into the number two spot by assets in the Philippines.
