泰语融合

Kasikornbank, Thailand's third-largest commercial bank, was on the brink of ruin. Asia's 1997'98 financial crisis had devastated the institution's balance sheet by pushing its nonperforming loans to an overwhelming 30 percent of assets. Its CEO, Banthoon Lamsam, a member of the family that had owned the bank for generations, concluded that Kasikorn -- and the rest of Thailand's family-dominated banking industry -- was in for wrenching and irreversible change. In full crisis mode, Banthoon slapped a moratorium on lending and in April 1998 jetted abroad, hat in hand, to raise fresh capital to salvage the then-53-year-old enterprise.

他成功地反对所有赔率。同月，在亚洲的第一个大型私募股权问题自1997年7月危机开始以来，Kasikorn从国际投资者收集了8.57亿美元。资本输液给了银行新生活 - 以巨大的成本为准。它将Lamsam家族的持股从30％以上的持股下降到不到5％。

然而，仅仅四个月后，Kasikorn的股价就从88泰铢（合2.12美元）暴跌至15泰铢。投资者开始担心，印尼1997年8月卢比贬值引发的当地危机恶化，将在整个地区蔓延金融危机。

“投资者很疯狂，但作为一个群体，他们误读了亚洲，”班顿说他们认为这将是一个V型复苏。事实并非如此。这是一个漫长的过程

泰国其他大部分家庭持有的银行并没有像Kasikorn一样幸运，其股份大幅恢复到截至7月中旬左右的截至泰铢。当泰铢危机在“97夏天爆发后，存款人在泰国金融公司和银行开始时，中泰银行家庭在政府将其突然破产的银行划分，并将其纳入国立救援设施时，中泰银行家庭在无助地看待。

"In hindsight, we got away with a very small window," recalls Banthoon in a recent interview with Institutional Investor. "If we hadn't recapitalized precisely when we did, we wouldn't have survived. We were lucky."

Kasikorn, once known overseas as Thai Farmer's Bank, depends these days more on calculation than on luck. Unlike most Thai commercial banks, Kasikorn had the foresight to outsource the recovery of bad loans to external experts like Goldman, Sachs & Co. and General Electric Capital Corp. That freed up its managers to focus on restructuring the bank rather than chasing down bad debts.

Bangkok-based analysts generally give Banthoon high marks for revamping Kasikorn. Every facet of the bank's operations, from risk management to information technology to human resources, has been thoroughly modernized.

“Kasikorn的成本效率和资产质量now considered the best in the sector," says Vincent Milton, managing director at Fitch Ratings (Thailand). Fitch has upgraded Kasikorn twice this year, bumping up its long-term foreign currency debt rating from BBB- to BBB+. "These steps are yielding results and helping the bank return to profitability," says Milton.

The rosier outlook reflects not only Kasikorn's recovery but also the much improved performance of the Thai economy. Gross domestic product grew a robust 6.1 percent in 2004, cooling only slightly from 2003's 6.9 percent clip. But higher oil prices are likely to dampen growth across Asia this year, and Thailand, one of the region's biggest net importers, is feeling squeezed. GDP growth fell from 5.1 percent in last year's fourth quarter to 3.3 percent in 2005's first quarter, reflecting a slowdown in both manufacturing and consumption.

The government is hoping to fill the growth gap by ramping up 1.7 trillion baht of infrastructure spending, which should get under way in earnest in early 2006. Yet some economists caution that the more import-intensive projects' commercial viability is questionable as long as oil prices hover at $60 a barrel.

Kasikorn, with its 13 percent share of Thailand's deposits and loans, has profited nicely from the economic upturn to date. Strong loan growth coupled with a falling cost of funds helped net a 15.3 billion baht (or $368 million) profit in 2004, up 12 percent year-over-year. Kasikorn issued dividends this year for the first time since 1996. According to Fitch, the bank's net interest margins are the highest of all Thai banks: 3.45 percent.

The performance is all the more impressive considering the wide range of financial services that the bank promotes through its 496 branches. Kasikorn does everything from retail banking to investment banking to trade financing. It also runs Thailand's biggest private investment fund: Kasikorn Asset Management Co., which oversees more than $4 billion.

Meanwhile, the bank is slowly extending its global reach with branches in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Los Angeles and the Cayman Islands, as well as representative offices in London and three locations in China: Beijing, Shanghai and Kunming. To reflect the bank's expanded mandate at home and abroad, Banthoon in April 2003 dropped its old foreign name, "Thai Farmer's Bank," which is a crude translation of Kasikorn. "I was tired of explaining why this was not a farmers' bank," he says.

一般的泰国银行可以做的不仅仅是改名。这些银行的不良贷款（平均占其资产的10.7%）仍然是外国投资者关注的问题，尤其是那些因1997年泰国核爆炸而被烧毁的投资者。对于美国和欧洲的大银行来说，1%到2%的不良贷款是正常的。尽管Kasikorn今年第一季度末的不良贷款占其资产的11.6%，略低于行业平均水平，但这一数字比2004年第一季度的15.6%有了显著改善。

一位对泰国银行总体持悲观看法的投资者是专注于泰国的对冲基金Quest Capital Co.的投资组合经理兰斯·德普（Lance Depew）他认为：“银行业的壁橱里还有很多秘密。”许多投资者认为，监管机构允许泰国银行掩盖一些最大的问题。”他断言，在利率创纪录低位的环境下，负债公司和银行之间进行的许多贷款重组，现在都有可能恢复到全球和泰国银行的不良地位利率呈上升趋势。Depew管理着2.5亿美元的资产，事实上他正在做空泰国银行的股票。

尽管如此，他认为Kasikorn通过其重组努力使其同行中的自我介绍。特别是，他赞成银行引入信息技术，以提高效率和盈利能力。

其他分析师对泰国银行非常乐观。Andrew Stotz，曼谷麦古地证券研究负责人，项目中，公共和私营投资的激增将使银行贷款增长降至今年的8％，并于2006年达到11％以上。他预测，在哪个之间的蔓延银行支付存款支付以及他们在2004年的2.6％攀升至今年的资产的2.9％，并将在2007年之前达到3.4％的预定峰值。

斯托茨说：“我们看到泰国银行业即将出现强劲复苏。”我们预计，在可预见的未来——至少在未来两三年——我们将看到良好的核心业绩他说：“这可能意味着贷款增长比过去慢，但在这个市场，转向更具风险调整的资本回报率是一件大事。”

ESTABLISHED IN 1945 WITH REGISTERED CAPITAL of 5 million baht ($250,000 at the time), Kasikornbank was one of Thailand's first Thai-owned commercial banks. Banthoon's thrifty grandfather, Chote Lamsam, parlayed the profits from his modest rice-milling, logging and variety store businesses into a founding stake in the bank, whose focus was trade finance and working capital facilities. In the early 1960s the Lamsams bought out the other shareholders and assumed majority control. The family listed the bank on the Thai stock exchange in 1976.

Kasikorn在20世纪80年代从该国的工业化中获得了巨大的利润，它的客户手册仍然是泰国最有成就的工业和服务业企业家之一。泰国最大的农业企业Charoen Pokphand Foods；泰国航空公司，国家航空公司；泰国最大的建筑材料生产商暹罗水泥（Siam Cement）都是Kasikorn的首选客户。

The debonair Banthoon was groomed from an early age to take over the bank. He received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1975 and his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1977. After a two-year stint with the Thai Defense Ministry's directorate of joint intelligence, Banthoon began a 13-year climb up the company ladder.

He acquired seasoning as a banker mostly in Kasikorn's domestic department, which focused predominantly on corporate lending. The personal relationships he cultivated in those early years contributed to the bank's crucial decision to outsource its debt collecting after the crisis hit, Banthoon says.

1992年,他接续他父亲作Kasikorn的总统ident and CEO and quickly earned a reputation as an aggressive boss. Banthoon's take-no-prisoners style is legendary. One famous episode: As head of the secular oversight committee of the Maha Makutrajavithayalai Foundation, a charity run by Buddhist monks to educate and help the poor, Banthoon, himself a devout Buddhist, came into conflict with the most-senior monks over his efforts to introduce greater transparency into the foundation's asset management. The row was resolved only after the highly revered Thai royal household intervened in Banthoon's favor.

The Asian financial crisis changed Kasikorn and, to some extent, changed Banthoon as a manager as well. The bank has become more institutionalized in its structure: State Street Bank and Trust Co. and HSBC (Singapore) Nominees PTE are among Kasikorn's top ten shareholders, and Western executives now sit on its board of directors.

The shift from a family-dominated to an institutionalized shareholder structure has fundamentally changed the way Kasikorn is managed -- and for the better, according to Banthoon. "When I took over the job 13 years ago, board discussions were never very intense because everything was going well," he says, laughing. "We reached all the targets; loan growth was high. There was never any discussion of issues like risk management or governance. They were totally foreign concepts. Now the board is more hands-on. They scrutinize what's going on at the bank, and we have to respond."

班通半开玩笑地说，唯一能让人想起拉姆森家族60年来管理卡西科恩的是他的存在和挂在办公室外的家族肖像，他的办公室位于曼谷多沙的拉布拉纳郊区闪闪发光的菱形总部顶层，与中央商务区隔湄南河相望(事实上，班通的叔叔班永·拉姆萨姆是卡西科恩的董事会主席。）

Postcrisis，Banthoon剩下Kasikorn的首席执行官。他的诚信经历和声誉，而不是他的家庭关系，是董事会的点头。决定被证明是一个好的。1999年，丛门及其管理人员设计了一个八时针战略来改革银行并加强其职能。这项努力的基础是提高风险管理系统，包括关于相关党贷款的机构检查 - 这项实践在危机期间在Kasikorn的资产负债表中留下了张大洞。

该行的贷款官员曾经充当过一站式放贷人的角色，声称对贷款过程的各个方面都有影响，从贷款发放到承销。危机后的调查显示，与客户过于亲密的关系往往会给银行经理的信贷决策蒙上阴影。但据班通说，那个旧政权已经被彻底推翻了。

最近，Kasikorn放弃了它的“没有土地，没有贷款”政策，延长了新的贷款。该公式几乎完全基于借款人的财产，以抵押为抵押品。在其实地，是数学应用的信用评分和风险调整的定价模型，类似于大型国际银行使用的模型。Kasikorn也转变了贷款程序：贷款不再承担在他们发起的地方，而是在中央后台办公室。

Banthoon表示，新订单在银行业务发展和内部控制部门之间采取了“建设性张力”。“基本上，系统建立起来，以便贷款人会抱怨规则太严格，无法做生意，”他解释道。“然后我们找到了实现共同点的方法。这是一种更健康的方式。”

接下来，改革议程是一场彻底，尽管逐步，缩小规模。Kasikorn推出了超过5,000名员工，提前退休，从预定峰值超过15,000到少于10,000的预定峰值减少了银行的工资单。

这扫清了道路促进一个新情况ation of predominantly Western-educated middle managers. Kasikorn now has the lowest average-age profile among all Thai banks. The typical manager is in his or her late 30s or early 40s.

"They've shown a willingness to promote young blood that you haven't seen at most other Thai banks," says Therapong Vachirapong, a strategist at Phatra Securities in Bangkok. "Where they haven't been able to recruit outside talent, they've worked hard to develop it internally. It's a commitment to human resource development you just didn't see in the past." A pay-for-performance scheme that links compensation to revenue generation and cost savings replaces the old fixed-bonus system.

Kasikorn has poached top talent from both the public and private sectors. Last year Banthoon recruited Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Thailand's former Securities and Exchange Commission chief, to serve as the bank's president, relinquishing that title himself. Prasarn, who is in his early 50s, oversees day-to-day operations, freeing Banthoon to focus on more-strategic matters, such as partnerships and acquisitions. Prasarn's calm counterbalances Banthoon's self-confessed fieriness.

Their yin and yang provide equilibrium for the bank, in a manner akin to the Western "good cop, bad cop routine," but with an Asian twist. In Buddhist Thailand conflict-avoidance is the golden rule. That has made it hard to initiate corporate reform at many Thai businesses and banks. Breaking with that social convention, Banthoon is quite outspoken in identifying problems and, as he candidly puts it, "deadwood" employees. Prasarn helps to allay employee resistance to Banthoon's sometimes tough reforms.

Banthoon courted well-respected technocrat Piyasvasti Amranand, former head of the government's National Energy Policy Office, to serve as chairman of Kasikorn's asset management operation. Piyasvasti's no-holds-barred plan for privatizing Thailand's electricity monopoly, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, had brought him into conflict with Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who favors a more gradual method. (EGAT remains wholly state-owned.) Banthoon wants Piyasvasti to integrate Kasikorn's historically aloof asset arm into the bank's mainstream retail operations. This is in line with the Bank of Thailand's "one footprint" directive, which calls for banks to consolidate their subsidiaries under one roof. Piyasvasti sees a huge opportunity to lure Kasikorn's customers out of low-yielding deposits and into higher-yielding financial products, such as mutual funds.

“目前基金行业管理资产总额仅占1万亿泰铢，而银行存款金额为5.5万亿泰铢，其中包括超过15,000个账户，存入至少1000万泰铢，”Piyasvasti说。“这表明，人们仍然积累了银行存款中的大量财富，赚取了非常少量的兴趣。它还表明了共同基金行业的增长的非凡潜力。”

Banthoon的另一个招聘赛车是经验丰富的银行家David Hendrix，在亚洲共用20多年的花旗银行。Hendrix，谁领导了Kasikorn的零售业务集团，为商业贷款提供了不到1000万泰铢的信用评分制度 - 这是一个底层的市场，高收入的市场。

The bank's assessment of the creditworthiness of a small or medium-size enterprise, or SME, is decided on the basis of 23 criteria, ranging from sales growth to debt levels to industry trends. "We're simply making better-calculated credit decisions than we used to," says Hendrix.

Credit scoring has cut Kasikorn's cost for serving SME customers from $900 per loan to less than $600. Hendrix predicts that once the bank's credit analysts become more comfortable with the advanced algorithms that drive the scoring, the bank's processing costs will fall below $450.

Kasikorn has nearly 50 percent of Thailand's SME loan market, more than twice the 23 percent share of its chief competitor, Bangkok Bank. Big international players, such as GE Capital and Standard Chartered Bank, are scrambling to get a piece of the action, using their own credit-scoring schemes.

Ironically, being more prudent about risk management has not always endeared the bank to Prime Minister Thaksin's government. In 2002 the premier's economic advisers lambasted the country's top three private banks -- Bangkok Bank, Kasikorn and Siam Commercial Bank -- for allegedly holding back the recovery by hoarding capital rather than lending it. Private banks fired back that they were required by law to set aside capital as bad-loan provisions.

Thaksin ordered state-owned banks to fill the gap by lending more. Such government-directed lending accounted for nearly 70 percent of all new loans in the financial system in 2002 and 2003. Analysts questioned the quality of the state banks' loans and raised concerns about whether the banks were undermining the sounder credit culture that sophisticated private banks like Kasikorn had been striving to achieve.

Then in August 2004 the Bank of Thailand announced that the state-run Krung Thai Bank had racked up $1.1 billion in new nonperforming loans. Anxious foreign investors dumped Thai bank shares.

Until the bad-debt revelations, Krung Thai's lending spree had put pressure on Kasikorn to boost its own lending. "It's always tricky," says Banthoon. "Regardless of all the talk about risk management, if your loan growth lags behind that of your competitors, nobody understands -- particularly in an up-up-uptrend market. If you underperform too much, your stock price doesn't go up."

Nevertheless, Kasikorn avoided getting caught up in the lending frenzy. After years of nursing NPLs, the bank only recently resumed lending, recording 9 percent year-on-year loan growth in 2004.

"Yes, [Krung Thai] grew their loan books, but some of their clients were the higher-risk segment," says Banthoon "That's not our target. We're disciplined about the conditions of our lending. There is only so far you can follow them in terms of pricing, in relaxation of lending conditions." Several senior Krung Thai managers now face criminal charges for their role in extending the allegedly fraudulent loans.

与国有银行的贷款竞争相比，Banthoon更担心的是，国内市场的外国竞争可能会加剧。自泰国国泰惨败以来，国有银行的贷款竞争已经减弱。曼谷正在与美国谈判一项自由贸易协定，该协定可能会消除阻碍外国银行建立泰国分行网络的保护主义壁垒。

"The financial crisis was one kind of problem," says Banthoon. "Competition in the new financial world is even more frightening." He explains: "The crisis was one-dimensional: We were just too greedy. International competition is a more complex, multidimensional issue." Analysts note that Thai banks are vulnerable in part because they have badly lagged their Western counterparts in developing such complex financial products as derivatives.

Foreign banks are circling. As early as 1999, in the immediate wake of the financial crisis, Citigroup expressed interest in acquiring the distressed assets and branch network of the nationalized Bangkok Metropolitan Bank, but ultimately decided against it.

最近的市场聊天表明，如果花旗是以自由贸易协议以主要方式进入泰国的银行市场，Kasikorn将是最有可能的目标。如果Citi出价Kasikorn会发生什么？

“没有交易，”班顿挑衅地说泰国应该有泰国银行。”

在任何情况下，外国银行都发现泰国银行市场难以破解。Banthoon指出，ABN AMRO与曼谷的债务骑行银行亚洲的战略合作结束于2004年荷兰银行的商业银行市场退出。新加坡主导的合资企业，包括与新加坡开发银行和联合海外银行开发银行的联系，未能扣除泰国机构的市场份额，包括Kasikorn，近五年在购买进入市场后。

Kasikorn的首席执行官辩称，抵御外部威胁的最佳方式是通过内部力量。他把大量时间花在改善银行的“企业结构”上。班顿说：“保持一个有才华的团队团结、充满动力和民主总是一个挑战。总有竞争夺走好人。我的挑战是让我们的员工相信他们不是为家庭甚至股东工作，而是为了更高的目标：他们自己的工作满意度。