HUMANIST
Work well-done
Luis Valls was obsessed with ensuring the bank’s profitability and ensuring customer satisfaction, driving him to work tirelessly from morning to night. He wanted to have the best bank, and he achieved it. But what did having the best bank mean to him?
Profitability and the person
Pablo Pérez López, scientific director of the Institute of Culture and Society at the University of Navarra, describes in the preface of Jaime Díez Yáñez’s doctoral thesis on Luis Valls1 what it meant to have the best bank: “Being the best bank meant, in the mind of the President of Popular, serving customers better, which he believed was primarily a matter of the treatment they received. It was not theoretical or a question of products, it was very specific and personal. For example, he wanted to attend to customer complaints personally. It also meant treating his executives, employees, and shareholders well. That was a priority for him and a synonym for good governance. This great challenge was his principal concern and kept him active and open to change.”
In addition to always putting the individual at the center, Luis Valls pursued above all the profitability of the bank, which he considered the main parameter of success within his principles. An article about him explained it this way2:
“Perhaps his most judicious characteristic has been to prefer safety and profitability over adventure and size, financial quality over quantity. This modesty has kept him somewhat on the sidelines of the race among the big players in the sector, but instead, he has managed to occupy the first place in profitability.”
The Secret of His Success
Who could better describe the reasons why Banco Popular was the envy of the entire sector than Luis Valls himself? No one, and this is demonstrated by the comments he made when invited to do so by the director of Tiempo magazine3:
“Banco Popular is a successful bank, and when we try to explain to those who ask us about its reasons, we come up with things as strange as ‘because we don’t create problems for ourselves,’ ‘because we have set out to do it,’ ‘because that is what we focus on,’ ‘because we know how to rectify in time,’ ‘because of the psychological advantage of being the smallest of the big banks’…”
The Best Bank in the World
With these seemingly simple phrases, Luis Valls continued, we want to explain the inexplicable. That’s why when Euromoney designed a ranking system to determine the best banks in the world and combined quantifiable factors (profitability, management, control) with other less tangible ones (quality of earnings, strategy, organization), the result was surprising for them, at least at first glance.”
He was referring to the fact that Banco Popular had appeared top of the ranking. That’s a job well done.
It is worth noting that in the early nineties, when the bank received this recognition from Euromoney, Gene Walden4 placed Popular at the forefront of his ranking of the most attractive stocks in the world. “In an imperfect world,” he concluded, “Banco Popular Español has distinguished itself as one of the most perfect values globally. This banking institution, headquartered in Madrid, has achieved impressive figures in each key point (stock price evolution, profits, and dividends, firmness, and cyclical trend). And it can be said that even its price-earnings ratio (close to 7.0) is surprising for a developing entity,” declared the financial expert.
Bibliography
(1) Thesis “Luis Valls. Popular Bank. A repertoire”, by Jaime Díez Yáñez.
(2) New Monday February 18, 1991
(3) Article written by Luis Valls on the occasion of the special Tenth Anniversary edition of TIEMPO magazine (2/24/92)
(4) Gene Walden is the author of, among other publications, the famous guide “100 Best Stocks to Own in the World”, which appears every year.
