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 With a good 23 years of experience in different fields of bank management: from being a junior officer to senior manager and still young is what made Suman Neupane the first choice of the promoters of Global Bank, a regional bank to be based in Birgunj and planning to start operation in a couple of months, to head it as its CEO.
But what made Neupane accept this offer leaving a position in the Himalayan Bank Ltd. (HBL) where he had been working for the past 13 years and where, according to him, he got one challenging jobs after another and was moving up the organisational hierarchy pretty fast? "To be the CEO of a bank is what a professional banker aspires to and that was the opportunity I was offered in the new bank while it was going to take several years of waiting to be the CEO of HBL," is his reply. What about the feeling among the HBL's top management? "They should feel proud that a member of their staff is being recruited as the CEO of another bank and that is exactly what Ashoke Rana, my old friend and the CEO of HBL, told me when I informed him about the decision," he says. "Had I left HBL to join an equivalent position or only one rung above than where I was at HBL, that would have been different." Neupane started his career in banking while undergoing a B.Sc. course at Tri-Chandra College . Though a number of his relatives were already in the banking field including central banking, it was rather the attraction of the fresh glamour of private sector bank during that time coupled with the coaxing of his friends that encouraged him to join Nabil Bank, he says. Though he says he is not very good in mathematics, he was in the Nabil team that developed the first real-time multi-tasking banking software of Nepal . This software was later developed into Pumori by Mercantile, the company that assisted the Nabil team. The banks that purchased Pumori had to hire either Neupane or his teammates to implement it. He was invited to HBL for the same purpose and was offered a promotion and a hefty rise in salary.
 Personal Side
l Family man: Spends his holidays with his family: his father, mother, wife and two children. Considers his wife to be a fulltime job holder. ""Raising two children is in itself a full time job."
l Loves pets: "But my pet enthusiasm is more on losing them than retaining them."
l Loves sports: Now spends more time in watching sports on TV rather than actually playing them. Is planning to join a golf club, but wonders how practical it would be as he would be based at Birgunj where there is no golf course.
l Loves to train staff: "When I have the job of conducting training sessions, I refer to management books. Otherwise, I'm happy reading newspapers and magazines."
l Food: Everything except Continental. Interested in experimental cooking.
l Best friends: "Professionals have a really compartmentalised life. There are so many different friends who help me in different fields of my professional work. But the first person I would phone whenever there is really a personal emergency, is my childhood friend Dipak Bahadur Singh, who is an engineer." |
But once Neupane entered HBL he stayed there despite the culture of job-hopping prevalent among the Nepali bank professionals. The reason, according to him, was that he was given the perfect platform to launch himself into the profession. He praises HBL management for helping him get USAID scholarship to complete his management degree from the prestigious Asian Institute of Management (AIM), Philippines . What is more, he was sent for the study on a paid holiday and was granted promotion while he was pursuing his study in Philippines . So, he refused a job offer from a Malaysian bank while he was in Philippines . After he returned, he was transferred from the technical to managerial duties. "Therefore, there was no need for me to look for greener pastures elsewhere", he explains. During this period, he developed several products for HBL including HimalRemit to handle remittance and opened a couple HBL branches which were soon made so big that the portfolio of one such bank was higher than that of some new banks.
But when the promoters of Global Bank approached him, he saw it as an irresistible opportunity. Had he waited in HBL, he would be the CEO but for that the waiting period would a longer as there are others ahead of him on the lineup for the position. Global Bank has a paid up capital of Rs. 30 crores and is promoted by a consortium of industrialists, traders and persons involved in the business of handling remittance. Then how is the new bank going to take on the competition? "As I see, the foreign exchange that comes into the country as remittance is not being used to develop the productive capacity, there is good scope in this line but the existing banks are not paying it enough attention, may be because they are busy in their own lines of business. We are going to institutionalise the system of utilising the remittance towards capital creation within the country," he summarises the company vision. As the CEO, Neupane is aiming at making the company different by focusing more on operational efficiency. "Right now all the banks are declaring profit as the margins are very high. But that is going to change after foreign banks are allowed to open their branches here as per the WTO provision. Only those banks will survive and flourish that have operational efficiency," he says.
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