Business
EastWest a major credit card issuer
SECURITY BANK’S ADVOCACY.
Security Bank Foundation Inc., the corporate social responsibility arm of Security Bank Corp., turns over three new school buildings in Bulacan and Pampanga on November 9. The recent turnovers bring the total Security Bank school building donations to 65, a fitting celebration to the bank’s 65th anniversary. Shown during the turnover rites are (second row from left) Security Bank president and CEO Alfonso Salcedo Jr., SBFI chairman Rafael Simpao Jr. and Department of Education representatives.
EASTWEST Banking Corp., the financial unit of Filinvest Development Corp., is now among the biggest credit card issuers in the industry after the recent migration of the retail banking business of Standard Chartered Bank Philippines to the bank in the latter part of November. EastWest successfully completed the transfer of Standard Chartered Bank’s retail business, which included retail deposits, wealth management, personal loans and credit cards. EastWest executive vice president and consumer lending cluster head Jacqueline Fernandez said Monday the completion of the retail transfer solidified EastWest’s position as the fifthlargest credit card issuer in the industry today with over a million cards-in-force. She said that the transfer ushered in two new premium
NFA to accredit more rice outlets nationwide By Anna Leah E. Gonzales
T
HE National Food Authority said Monday it has instructed its field offices to ease the requirements on the accreditation of rice retailers.
NFA officer-in-charge Tomas Escarez said the move aimed to make government rice accessible to the consuming public by increasing the number of accredited outlets nationwide. Escarez ordered field offices to accredit additional retail outlets not only inside the market but even in remote barangays to make NFA rice readily available, especially to the marginalized sector. NFA rice is currently being sold at P27 per kilogram for regular milled and P 32 per kilogram for well milled. “Interested applicants can be issued a temporary accreditation pending completion of inspection and submission of requirements so they can immediately sell NFA rice to the consuming public,” Escarez said.
NFA currently has 16,775 accredited rice outlets nationwide. Aside from the traditional rice outlets inside and outside the markets, NFA has other non-traditional rice outlets, such as the Bigasan sa Barangay, Bigaasan sa Parokya and Barangay Food Terminal. NFA also participates in the Diskwento Caravan in the different municipalities organized by the Department of Trade and Industry to bring affordable government rice closer to the public, especially during this holiday season. Escarez said the food agency had distributed 21,405,835 bags of good quality but low-priced NFA rice from January to November of this year through accredited outlets across the country. He said the agency planned to open more non-traditional rice outlets to further widen its reach and ensure more lowincome consumers would benefit from the government subsidized rice. The Cabinet earlier recommended to President Rodrigo Duterte the abolition of NFA’s commercial functions, including rice importation. Economic Planning Secretary and Neda
director-general Ernesto Pernia cited a consensus among Cabinet secretaries to split up the regulatory and commercial functions of NFA to prevent rice smuggling, among others. Pernia said the recommendation was still subject to the approval of Duterte and the amendment of the NFA charter. “We had a meeting with the NFA, and it’s not official yet, but our collective decision was going to be proposed to the president and I’m sure he will like it. It is to remove the proprietary and commercial activity of NFA and focus on its core function of regulation,” Pernia said. Pernia said the splitting of NFA’s commercial and regulatory functions would also resolve the rice smuggling problem. “It also removes the smuggling problem. The problem with NFA is that it buys high and sells low, which results in losses. The accumulated debt of NFA is already P165 billion,” Pernia said. He said NFA would no longer be engaged in buying and selling, meaning it would focus on regulation to ensure adequate buffer stock of rice and other grains. “They should have a buffer stock. Buffer stock is really reserved. It should always be there, in case of contingencies,” said Pernia.
Big tobacco farmers group backs cigarette tax bill THE National Federation of Tobacco Farmers Association and Cooperatives has backed House Bill 4144, calling it the “true pro-farmers measure and pro-poor.” NAFTAC president Mario Cabasal called on his group’s members to focus on the real issues surrounding the bill, saying the biggest concern was the fate of the country’s tobacco farmers and their continued livelihood. “We support HB 4144 because it is the true pro-farmers measure. We had already voiced our position when the bill was being discussed in Congress and nothing has changed,” Cabasal
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said in a statement. “I call on our members not to be influenced by the reports that are coming out regarding HB 4144. What will be good for the farmers is the measure that will ensure our continued survival. In our view, that is HB 4144,” he added. Cabsal said a unitary tax rate, which is mandated under Republic Act 10351 or the Sin Tax Reform law, would be detrimental to local tobacco farmers. “A unitary tax rate will benefit only the premium cigarette brands, which are the foreign brands. They will just import higher quality tobacco
leaves. This means we the local farmers who produce low grade tobacco will suffer the most,” he said. “Locally produced tobacco leaves are mostly low grade. Our fear is that if a unitary tax rate is imposed, local production will be affected. There will be less purchases of our produce and our livelihood will be greatly affected. And this is what we told Congress (during the deliberations on HB 4144),” he added. HB 4144, authored by partylist Rep. Michael B. De Vera, seeks to amend Section 145 (c) of the National Internal Revenue Code of 1997, which imposes a unitary
tax rate of P30 per pack for both low-priced and premium brands starting in January 2017. Low-priced brands are those that retail for P11.50 per pack or lower, while premium brands are those that sell at over P11.50 per pack. The current tax rate mandated under RA 10351 is P25 per pack for low priced brands and P29 per pack for premium brands. HB 4144 seeks to reinstate the two-tier system in place of the unitary tax but with a tax rate of P32 per pack for low-priced brands and P36 per pack for premium brands, with an annual increase of five percent every year.
credit card variants, the EastWest Visa Platinum Credit Card and the EastWest Priority Banking Visa Infinite Credit Card. The launch of the aforementioned products is in line with EastWest’s plan to grow the affluent segment of its credit card business. “Expanding our credit card portfolio underscores our goal of strengthening EastWest’s consumer lending business,” Fernandez said. All EastWest credit cards issued are now EMV chip-enabled in compliance with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ mandate to adopt chip technology for better card security. EastWest was able to comply ahead of BSP’s deadline to implement the initiative. EMV stands for Europay, Mastercard and Visa. EastWest president and chief executive Antonio Moncupa Jr. earlier said the transfer would benefit all its new customers.
After first six months, Duterte’s real work begins THE period June 30– December 22, 2016 has been a time like no other for this country and its people. That period has comprised the first six months of the administration of the man who was elected in the May 9 Presidential election—Rodrigo Duterte. Those first six months have been a time of indulgence by the lawyer who was once a prosecutor and mayor of Davao City. One can think of no better word to describe Rodrigo Duterte’s conduct in office since June 30—and the weeks immediately preceding his taking of the Presidential oath. It is as though the Man from Davao thought he could take into the halls of Malacañang the mindset that he had and the way he conducted himself when he was mayor of one of this country’s major cities. Truly, Rodrigo Duterte has been indulging himself during the last six months of 2016. Whatever the real motivation, he has let fly cuss words, insults and invectives with alacrity and with apparent personnel satisfaction. That kind of language is protected by the Constitutional guarantee of free speech, but not when the insulter is President of the Republic and the targets of the insults are real people who matter much to the Filipino people, such as the President of this country’s principal ally, the head of the religion to which the great majority of Filipinos belong and the head of the closest thing that the world has to a government. Mr. Duterte can cuss and insult all he wants, but not at the expense of the 34 million Filipinos who did not vote for him and the 16 million who did. The coarse language and the worse conduct of former city mayor Rodrigo Duterte has already cost this country a lot in terms of international goodwill and material benefits. The latest loss has been the suspension by the US government of $43 million worth of Millennium Challenge Corporation economic assistance. MCC funds are intended for the improvement of the lot of poor Filipinos, for whom Mr. Duterte has professed to care. Mr. Duterte’s supporters have been deafeningly silent on the matter, but among themselves bankers, securities market people and corporate executives are saying that the steady net outflow of funds in recent months is only partly attributable to the longexpected change in US Federal Reserve interest policy. And the documentable slowdown in US investment commitments does not help the Philippines’ near-the-bottom in the Asian FDI (foreign direct investments) ladder. Personal indulgence by an elected official, especially the No. 1 official of a country, cannot go on forever. If the last six months have been a honeymoon period—for the 62 percent of Filipinos who did not vote for him that has come to an end. Honeymoon is over. The stark realities of life for 105 million Filipinos must now be faced. The six-month period of drama, theatrics and grandstanding is over. The time has come to start grappling with realities and doing the business of the nation. There is so much work Rodrigo Duterte & Co. need to do—creating jobs, building infrastructure, making agriculture more efficient, food self-sufficiency, strengthening and broadening the educational system, giving more Filipinos access to health care, collecting more taxes, the list goes on and on. There is just so much work to be done. The remaining 11-twelfths of Rodrigo Duterte’s term must be a period of seriousness, focus and dedication. Let 2017 be the year for starting to do things that really improve this country and its people. E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com
Prepping a new Mac, 2016 IT’S been five years since I wrote about free software that new Mac users ought to be installing on their new machines, back when I was still running OS X 10.7 or Lion. I recently had the occasion to revisit the list, and thought it would be an opportune time to update it, given the many changes to the operating system since then. All of the software on this list is free—showing once again that you can extend the capabilities of your Mac without spending a lot. 1. LibreOffice. Five years ago, the Mac didn’t come with a free productivity suite. Nowadays, Pages (Apple’s word processor), Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentation software) come free with every installation of macOS Sierra. For those who insist on using MS Office, however, you can subscribe to Office 365 for P2,599 a year or buy the Office Home & Student 2016 package for P5,199. Or you can get LibreOffice for free. LibreOffice is a feature-rich, multi-platform (there are versions for the Mac, Linux and Windows), MS Office-compatible productivity suite with its own word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation software (Impress). There have been major improvements
since LibreOffice spun off from OpenOffice in 2010, making this a no-brainer for new Mac users. You can download the installer at the LibreOffice website (www.libreoffice.org) or install it through tha App Store by searching for LibreOffice Vanilla. 2. Firefox or Google Chrome. If, like me, you want a browser that works on multiple platforms, download and install Firefox (www. firefox.com) or Google Chrome (www.google. com/#q=chrome+for+mac) for your Mac. Both are excellent and the choice boils down to personal taste. 3. Dropbox. This free utility lets you save files to a Web server and automatically synchronizes them across all your computers. A cross-platform program, Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. With the program installed on my MacBook and a PC running Ubuntu Linux at home, I no longer have to save files I created on my notebook to a USB drive or e-mail them to myself to gain access to them on my desktop computer. Any file I save to the Dropbox folder is automatically made available to all my other registered devices. 4. MagiCal. MagiCal from Charcoal Design
(www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/magical) is a nifty utility that I use every day. The program sits on the right side of the menu bar and shows a compact monthly calendar when you click on the icon. You can tear off the calendar and have it sit anywhere on your desktop. 5. Unarchiver. Unarchiver is a free file unpacker that supports more formats than the built-in Archive Utility on the Mac. Supported formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, Lha and StuffIt. 6. Transmission. I used to like using uTorrent, then Deluge for torrent downloads but I’ve lately taken to the much lighter Transmission, a crossplatform BitTorrent client that runs natively on the Mac as well as Linux. (A version, TransmissionQT, caters to Windows users.) You can download Transmission from https://transmissionbt.com 7. Dr. Cleaner. Available as a free download on the App Store, Dr. Cleaner gives your Mac a performance boost by freeing up disk space and by also clearing up your Mac’s memory, two vital processes that can improve your system performance. Disk Clean purges useless cache files that can build up over time, empties out temporary download locations, deletes browser cache, cleans
out your trash and completely removes all traces of an application that you want to uninstall. Memory Optimizer, on the other hand, purges unused memory and makes it available to your Mac’s processor, frees up unnecessary memory used by recent files that you are done with, and gives you an easy memory monitoring application to analyze your Mac’s memory usage. 8. NTFS driver. If you use an external drive, chances are it’s been formatted to the NTFS (NT file system) standard, which still isn’t natively supported on the Mac. To read and write to NTFS drives, you’ll need a driver, such as the Paragon Driver for Mac OS, a free utility for Seagate drives. I’ve been using this for years without a problem, but what if you use other external drives? You might want to try Tuxera (www.tuxera.com), an open-source read-write NTFS driver that works for the Mac as well as Linux systems. Column archive and blog at: http://www.chinwong.com