NATIONAL Commercial Bank’s (NCB’s) new owner, Michael Lee Chin, yesterday placed a three-month moratorium on job cuts, telling employees to use that time to woo new customers to the bank, brush up their customer service skills and make a major drive for efficiency.

At the same time, he also announced that NCB would embark on an aggressive drive to win back customers both locally and internationally, using as the springboard the fact that the local entity no longer had bad debts and was now linked to the AIC Group.

It will also add a mixture of Jamaican nationalism to the effort. The new marketing slogan is “Come Back Home” — a tag line that all the remaining commercial banks in Jamaica are now owned by Canadian, US or Trinidadian companies.

Several customers deserted the bank because of the financial instability and fallout of the late 90s.

“It is well advertised that there are 864 of us that will have to go… and everybody is wondering: is it my time?” Lee Chin told several NCB employees at his first meeting with staff at the National Arena in Kingston. “That is obviously not the environment to be in because we don’t want anybody to be fearful.”

Lee Chin, a Jamaican-born Canadian, controls one of Canada’s major fund management companies, AIC Fund Managers, which, at the end of last year, had more than Can$15 billion under management and net worth of Can$1.2 billion. Lee Chin, a member of the Chen family that controls Jamaica’s SuperPlus Food Stores, controls 90 per cent of AIC.

He is paying J$6.034 billion for the government’s 76 per cent of NCB, $2.5 billion in cash and the remainder over nine years at the prevailing Treasury Bill rate at the payment periods.

NCB was one of the banks that the government had to rescue during the financial sector collapse of the 1990s, taking over $13 billion in bad debts off the bank’s books. At the end of last September, NCB had assets of $104.9 billion and net worth of about $9.1 billion.

A mere eight per cent of the NCB assets are in loans, the rest in government instruments bought with the paper received for its bad debts acquired by the government.

Having formally took control of the bank on Tuesday, Lee Chin called out NCB staff yesterday to share his vision for the institution and to declare that he wanted “a new culture” of efficiency, quality customer service and a transparent relationship between staff and management.

“I didn’t come to Jamaica to lay anyone off,” he told staff. “I came to Jamaica to help build an efficient bank.”

The bank, and ultimately the managers and workers, have to take one of two choices: bringing in more business or downsizing.

Said Lee Chin: “So I am saying to you ladies and gentlemen, if we could all work together and in the next year double the amount of business that NCB have, the question is: will we have to lay people off or would we have to hire new people?”

NCB has 2,400 staff, substantially down from its numbers before it started to cut jobs when hit by the crisis of the ’90s. But NCB employs about a third more people than the super-profitable Scotiabank Jamaica, with which it shares a similar capital base.

Lee Chin stressed that his preferred course to driving efficiency at NCB and bringing sustained profitability to the bank would be to increase its client base and to do more business. He, therefore, invited the staff to all consider themselves customer service representatives and to go home and record the names of 50 friends and acquaintances who they could woo to open NCB accounts.

From the management’s side, Lee Chin promised that staff welfare would be a top priority and that training would be important.

“We intend to lead by example,” he said. “We are not asking you to do anything that we are not prepared to do.”

His style, he claimed, was “transparent”.

Said Lee Chin: “I am willing to make a commitment. And my commitment is the following: You can say, ‘Mike, you know what, we are going to work to make this bank efficient…. I am going to work diligently… everybody’. If we can do that, we certainly don’t have to lay anyone off. That is my preferred course of action.

“So here is the commitment, for the next three months, we will both have the opportunity to strut our stuff. We are not going to lay anyone off, unless someone is really off the chart in terms of not being a part of the new culture.”

At the end of this three months, there will be a review to determine the next move.

“We will review it thereafter. So now it is in your court,” he said.

Mildly appealing to national sentiment, Lee Chin told his staff: “We have the opportunity as staff of NCB. We have a clean sheet of canvas and it is for us to create our own Mona Lisa because what NCB has that no other bank has, is emotional connection to the people… What NCB has is the fact that it is the local, indigenous, national bank.”

Lee Chin also offered as selling points for people to return to NCB, the bank’s relationship with AIC, the unique products it will offer and the quality of the balance it has as an over-capitalised bank.

“So we will be going on the road and encouraging (Jamaicans) to bring their funds here to send their remittances to us….and for all off them to come back home,” he said.