The older and larger of Angola's two state-owned banks, the Banco de Poupança e Crédito is working hard as it prepares to meet its midterm goals of modernizing infrastructure, downsizing staff and revamping its line of products and services so as to whip itself into competitive institutional shape for when the privatization sign goes up and strategic partners come calling. That may be two or three years down the road, says BPC's chairman, Paixão António Júnior, but major restructuring efforts are already underway on several fronts including the most superficial, tweaking the bank's external physical appearance.

"We are going to start by changing the looks of five of our 43 branch offices," notes Mr. Júnior. "It is important for us to send out a clear signal to people that some things have changed already and others are going to change in the future, that we have a new board of directors, a new set of priorities, and a change in the corporate mentality and work style."
Moving to a deeper level, Mr. Júnior says the ongoing reform dynamic involves the introduction of modern management systems, strict criteria on which business decision must be based and justified and extending the range of BPC's commercial banking skills. "We hope to enhance our financial intermediation capabilities by updating back office procedures, maximizing the return on our own resources and improving our risk and liquidity management."

As is to be expected in restructuring situations, the negative side will be personnel redundancies, slashing the 1500-strong workforce by half. "We were very careful about this, and brought in a Spanish consultancy firm to help us. They told us that we could maintain our current network and service level with half the number of employees. That's not going to make us popular but we have to make a choice as to whether we want to be a popular bank or a profitable one."
In its favor, BPC has something special going for it: a reputation as an open-minded and sympathetic source of funding for micro, small and medium-sized businesses. "This is our particular vocation and special market segment," notes Mr. Júnior. "Other banks worry about risk factors, scanty capitalization, difficulties with their accounting procedures. We, however, see these as the country's best hope for generating wealth and creating thousands of jobs. We try to give them a break whenever we can, and when the profits come in, we're glad to have them on deposit with us. This pays dividends later in terms of customer loyalty."