NCB determined to rebuild customer trust

NCB’s new CEO is trying to rebuild trust with their customers and shareholders.  How will he do it?

Over the last year, we’ve talked about NCB a lot!  Most of the time it’s about the stuff that customers and investors are angry about. Lack of dividends, fraud, poor customer service, ABM problems and the list goes on.

So naturally when I had the company’s new CEO, Robert Almeida on Taking Stock recently, I had to ask him about it.

“I think we broke the trust when we didn’t pay dividends for a quarter, then for two quarters and then all of a sudden we haven’t done it for over two years. We have to earn that trust back, I can’t tell you exactly how long it’s gonna take. We have to keep on delivering on what we’ve been doing, which is get the self governance going and improve customer service,” he said.

Customer service has been one of the top complaints about NCB.  And Almeida says they’ve been working hard on it.

“There was no noise over Christmas at the ABMs and that was a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that there was no noise. We were good
throughout Christmas and it was a big focus on our part just to make sure there was no noise not because we got accolades but because it would restore trust,” he said.

This is one of the ways the new NCB boss says he plans to restore investor confidence.  The other is governance.

So the acronym that he mentioned- EGC stands for efficiency, governance, and customer care. And if it sounds familiar it’s because it’s one of the guiding principles Chairman Michael Lee-Chin said he’ll be using for NCB going forward.

Now I’ve gotta add, the bar is much higher for NCB because it is the country’s largest financial institution. And like the CEO was saying, it does make their mistakes more visible, but it also doesn’t mean they get a free pass.

Even though he was just officially given the job, Almeida has been acting as CEO for about a year now, so we should be seeing some improvements by now.

And that’s the bottom line.