02066: A Good BPI Day


I'm a big BPI fan, obviously enough. I have a lot of faith in them as a banking institution and I even have invested in their stocks as part of my long term portfolio. And given my long relationship with BPI, there was no question in my mind which bank we'd tap for the corporate account of our new company. 

I had spent the past few weeks of the arduous business registration process looking into the requirements for working with BPI as a corporate customer and we finally managed to make the time to go to the bank earlier today. Because of the backwards nature of Philippine banking, this process took about two hours, most of which was spent verifying submitted documents and having us fill out a significant number of forms. There were forms for the corporations and forms for us as individuals. There were even two versions of a document testifying that we are not US citizens and thus not liable to pay US taxes.

Despite all this, it wasn't a bad experience. The employee assisting us with the account enrollment has been working at the branch for quite a lot of time, although she tends to remember Tobie more than me. She's graduated from front line teller role and is now comfortably seated at the new accounts desk. It's nice to see people moving up in the world. But of course even our friendly relationship with her had no real impact on how fast this whole process was going to take. 

But at least at the end of about two hours at the back and way more actual writing with a pen than I have had to do in months, we were done. The account got created and we have our new account number and we'll just have to wait for our first checkbook to arrive. 

We're not quite out of the woods yet. But I think I can see the sky beyond the trees.

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