Filipino-owned call center operates for the poor

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Filipino-owned call center operates for the poor
Posted: 3:26 AM Mar. 12, 2006
Vincent Cabreza, PDI Northern Luzon Bureau
Inquirer

(Published on page B7 of the March 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

BAGUIO CITY—Business Circles have been talking about them for months now. But few took serious note of talks that a group of retired bankers and accountants has set up a call center to finance philanthropic work in the poorest communities of this city.

Nam-ay Ti Umili Inc. (NTU), a foundation that provides business consultancy and micro-finance support for Baguio's urban poor, formed a non-stock, non-profit call center inside the Baguio City Economic Zone on Oct. 3, 2005 for under P2 million.

NTU is a two-year old foundation, which began as a group of computer-savvy business experts before it diversified into a P100,000 lending project that caters to street vendors and residents here.

NTU operates its 50-member call center as an outbound facility, which sells credit lines or American products overseas on behalf of foreign clients so it can generate P6 million each month to fund social projects.

Lilia de Lima, director-general of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza), has proclaimed the NTU call center as the only non-profit operation that has so far been allowed inside any government-administered economic zone in the country.

The fledgling call center trade also classifies NTU as the country's first all-Filipino venture in this industry, said Rodie Abejero, NTU operations manager.

Yet at first, even Peza could not immediately swallow NTU's profit-for-social-upliftment concept, says Erlinda Alvaro, NTU vice president and a retired manager of the Bank of Philippine Islands' Baguio branch.

She says NTU president Rafael Orpilla and NTU lawyer Arleen Rodelas-Orpilla had to challenge Peza to treat them as an "out-of-the box test case" before the foundation could sign up as the latest firm to locate to the Baguio zone.

Laurence Sagucio, one of NTU's trustees and a former official of PCIBank, says a general cynicism surrounding NTU's goals appeared influenced by the government's masked profiteering activities.

The direction taken by their five-month-old call center operation also wobbled slightly off course when some clients from the United States began pulling out on Feb. 24, the day President Macapagal-Arroyo declared a state of national emergency, Abejero says.

If NTU's clients, like street vendors, even knew how emergency rule had almost cost them their "business life support," they would immediately blame Ms Arroyo, says Teresita Sagucio, NTU treasurer and a former BPI official.

But she says blaming the government was the nature of poor Filipinos outside Metro Manila that the NTU wants to change.

"Nam-ay ti Umili" is the Ilocano translation of the phrase "community welfare" and it defines the outlook of this business venture.

Before they met up with NTU, the US-based Orpillas went to Baguio to find people begging for loans to cope with the slide in the national economy, Alvaro says.

Taking their cue from their findings, the Orpilla couple returned to the US to handle NTU's marketing overseas.

At about the same period, NTU's original business consultancy discovered a better way of doing business when it took on an auditing assignment for some Baguio-based lending institutions.

Alvaro says a credit check of the clients serviced by these lending firms revealed to them the kind of poverty Baguio residents would never encounter.

"For former bankers who used to deal exclusively with corporate accounts … we were suddenly going to the Irisan dumpsite. We saw the houses there have no floors. We saw beds set alongside kitchens that were an inch high in water … We realized that street vendors who lose a day's worth of [earnings] when caught by police will literally starve for the day [gauging by the condition of their homes]," she says.

Alvaro says their audit assignment was supposed to uncover irregularity in the lending firms' operations, "but it also enlightened" NTU about what the poor really need.

Traders sometimes diverted borrowed money to pay for tuition, buy medicine or add to savings intended for the overseas employment of a relative, Alvaro says, "although 90 percent of the borrowers ultimately complete their payments without a hitch."

These revelations guide NTU's call center mission, says Rika Cariño, the call center administrator.

All employees sign contracts that oblige them to devote a portion of their time to community service, and much of the NTU's training manuals supply management instructions that would help them transcend their career goals by focusing on "what they can do beyond their obligations to their respective families," she says.

It's a manual for a new business principle that the NTU plans to advocate in the future.

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