Boardroom Tea: Is TG Limcaoco leaving BPI too early?
“Is that Salve?” I heard TG Limcaoco’s voice from behind me as I sat at the 28th floor lobby of Ayala Triangle Gardens Tower where he holds office.
Typical TG, he escorts the person he was meeting with towards the exit and brings me to the meeting room that already has a half-glass of water on the table.
“Do you want anything? Coffee?” he asked. I said just water maybe, and he proceeds to pour the water himself from the pitcher in the corner. That day was going to be the bank’s 175th Anniversary celebration in the Marriott Grand Ballroom, but TG agreed to sit down with me for a meeting on world domination. Kidding.
As we discussed the succession announcement, BPI’s growth, the digitalization of financial services especially how it all began as “texting money”, zero transfer fees forever, his big push for financial education and the responsibility of corporations to help their employees have a foundation in retirement planning, I realized that TG is truly at the top of his game.
(That the game didn’t begin in BPI, or that GCash is actually his brainchild, belongs to another story. A book, in fact, that will soon be written, but again, I would not even dare to preempt it.)
There’s a document that contains all his plans for BPI that was discussed in the board five years ago. He says everything has been achieved in five years, a lot less than the usual eight-year BPI bank president term.
“You’re suffering from success, TG,” I burst out laughing. The phrase is an internal family joke in our household. Truth be told, everybody was surprised by the decision to hand over the leadership to Ginbee Go by next year. The question, however, was never “Why Ginbee?” Ginbee is clearly a top contender for the post with her strength in leadership and consumer banking.
The question was, “Why now?”
“It’s too early,” I heard people say over and over again, but at the same time there’s a sense that this was the strongest and most transparent succession story among the top three banks in the Philippines.
Ginbee was one of three major contenders, the two being Tere Marcial, BPI Wealth President and Eric Luchangco, Chief Finance Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, and Head of Strategy and Finance. TG said it was tough to choose among the three.
Ginbee will be the first woman to run BPI in 175 years, but that’s not her strongest suit. She topped the 1991 CPA board exam, graduated magna cum laude from UP Diliman (a fellow Iska, so forgive me the extra pride), and holds an MBA from Harvard. Twenty-three years at BPI, after stints at Citibank, Ayala Land and Procter & Gamble.
Last Thursday, before most of us had our first coffee, chairman Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala wrote to the bank’s staff: consumer banking head Maria Cristina “Ginbee” Go will succeed TG Limcaoco as president and CEO on April 26, 2027, right after the stockholders’ meeting and subject to regulatory approval.
That is 186 days of notice. TG stays on the BPI board and moves to senior governance roles across other Ayala companies. JAZA called transitions “a central principle of building enduring institutions.”
Look closely and the plan has a pattern.
TG ran BPI Family Savings Bank from 2010 to 2015. Ginbee took over BPI Family in 2017 and later led its integration into the mother bank. The thrift bank, it turns out, was the proving ground for the corner office.
And this is not BPI’s first tidy handover. TG’s own appointment was announced in December 2020 for April 2021, 127 days ahead, with Bong Consing, who had agreed to extend his term to see the transition through, keeping his board seat afterward.
The single biggest unpriced risk in a well-run bank is often the person running it. Investors discount what they cannot see, and an unnamed successor is the purest form of what they cannot see.
It also hands the new chief a very specific to-do list. BPI’s nine-month profit slipped 3.2 percent to P48.9 billion, as provisions for credit losses jumped 69 percent. Fee income, meanwhile, rose 15.5 percent on credit cards and insurance, among others, which is to say on Ginbee’s home turf. The consumer franchise she built is now both the growth engine and the first thing analysts will audit. No pressure.
Credit where it is due. UnionBank matched BPI almost to the day: Edwin Bautista agreed in 2022 to extend his term so a successor would be ready, and the bank named Ana Aboitiz-Delgado in June 2024 for a January 2025 start, 187 days ahead. Security Bank gave 97 days’ notice before Singaporean banker Victor Lee took over in January this year.
PNB is the cautionary tale. When Wick Veloso left for the GSIS in 2022, director Doy Casuela stepped in as acting president. A year of searching produced no one else, so Casuela, by then in his 80s, was made permanent. When the bank finally named Bautista in March 2025, the handover was 34 days away, and the business pages had his name before the disclosure did.
Then there are the two biggest private banks in the country. BDO’s Nestor Tan has led the bank since 1998, and his current term runs to March 1, 2028, about 16 months from now. Asked about succession in 2024, he said the bench was strong but that it was not easy to pinpoint who the successors would be. Metrobank’s Fabian Dee has been president since 2012. Neither bank has named a successor publicly.
Let me be fair here. Silence is not proof that a plan does not exist. The BSP already requires every bank board to run a succession program, and these long tenures have delivered: BDO is the biggest bank in the country for a reason. The plans may be sitting in a drawer. Kaya lang, depositors and minority shareholders cannot see inside the drawer.