MICHAEL Lee-Chin yesterday named Jamaican Aubyn Hill as the new managing director of National Commercial Bank (NCB) and said that Hill’s predecessor, Englishman Chris Lowe, will join AIC, Lee-Chin’s Canada-based fund management company.

Last night business analysts interpreted the move as being indicative of Lee-Chin’s new sales and marketing orientation for the bank he acquired in March when AIC paid $6.034 billion for the government’s 76 per cent share of NCB.

Hill, who joins NCB after 11 years as CEO of Bank of Oman, comes with a reputation as a turn-around and growth-oriented specialist, whereas in the two years that Lowe has been in Jamaica he has been viewed as a quiet, efficient, backroom technocrat.

But yesterday, Lee-Chin side-stepped such comparisons and pitched the decision as an effort to further strengthen management at his Burlington, Ontario organisation where Lowe will be a vice-president.

“We have taken huge responsibilities in the last six months,” Lee-Chin told reporters, adding that these have stretched the management capacities in his group.

“Chris will be sharing those responsibilities,” Lee-Chin said.

In April AIC, whose funds have more than Can$14 billion under management, bought 75 per cent of a small San Francisco fund management company, Elijah Asset Management. Shortly before that, AIC increased, to 75 per cent, the 20 per cent stake it held in the Mississauga, Ontario-based Georgian Capital Partners Inc, which sells AIC products.

Lowe, who formerly worked for Barclays Bank in Botswana, was recruited by NCB’s former chairman Oliver Clarke, to lead the restructuring of the bank, which was the major causality of the financial sector collapse of the mid-1990s.

Finsac, the vehicle used by the Government to shore-up failed banks and insurance companies, spent close to $50 billion to bailout NCB. Its books were cleared of bad debts and non-banking investments that had performed poorly, to prepare the bank for privatisation.

While Lowe has been credited with stabilising NCB — a fact hailed yesterday by his successor — analysts argued last night it was clear that Lee-Chin wanted to shift gear and to put NCB’s clean balance sheet and substantially idle assets to work.

“From where I sit, it seems that Lowe has done a good job, but is being pushed upstairs to give way to the new focus,” said one source. “Hill is coming to Jamaica with a very strong reputation.”

Hill, from Southfield in Clarendon, attended the Top Hill Primary School and Munro College. He worked briefly at the now closed Times Store before going to the University of Miami to do a degree in finance and economics and to Harvard for an MBA.

Hill later worked for American Express Bank in New York, Italy and Sri Lanka and in the Gulf States — Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.

“[He] is a world class banking executive with broad and deep banking experience,” Lee-Chin said in a statement.

It is Hill’s savvy in making the Bank of Oman the Sheikdom’s largest until recent mergers forced it into the number two spot that Lee-Chin is hoping he will transfer to NCB, which, up to June of this year, had a loan portfolio of $12.7 billion, against its total assets of about $112 billion.

That represented a 35 per cent jump in the loan portfolio over the comparative nine month period. But Lee-Chin needs to drive growth in this area to pump-up interest income so as to further offset declining returns on government paper. Interest income in June, when the NCB Group had net nine month profit of $814.4 million, was $1.268 billion — up $158 million from a year earlier.

The bank’s operating profit for the period had dipped substantially, reflecting a decline in returns on the $72 billion held in government fixed income instruments, including $48 billion in local government registered stocks (LRS) that were used to replace the illiquid bonds that Finsac had used to shore-up the bank.

Interest rates on government paper have been falling in keeping with the administration’s policy of generally lowering interest rates.

“Hill’s job will be to bring new customers to the bank — not just depositors but also good quality borrowers so that interest income will be a bigger part of the business,” suggested one market watcher.