The untiring bookkeeper
WASHINGTON Z. SYCIP, who turns 96 tomorrow, June 30, continues to redefine what nonagenarians like him are capable of doing. The legendary bookkeeper sits on multiple corporate boards, attends economic forums and pop concerts, and grants interviews to writers who can pass for his great- grandchildren, even on a Saturday morning. Though he has limited mobility and is hard of hearing, Mr. SyCip remains astonishingly sharp.
Mr. SyCip’s brilliance has been manifested since he was a school-age boy. The middle child of the lawyer and China Bank founder Albino SyCip and his wife, Helen Bau, he skipped several grade levels in elementary school, owing to how advanced his intelligence was. He graduated as valedictorian from Victorino Mapa High School in Manila. He completed a bachelor’s degree in commerce at the University of Santo Tomas in a span of two years, and graduated summa cum laude at the age of 17.
Immediately after graduation, he taught at his alma mater while completing a master’s degree. By the age of 19, not only was Mr. SyCip a master’s degree holder, he was also a certified public accountant. But his precociousness prevented him from practicing his profession, and so he went to the US to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University.
Mr. SyCip’s early life was not all about studying hard and getting really high grades. He became part of the US Air Force, doing cryptographic work in China Burma India Theater, during the Second World War. After the war came to an end, Mr. SyCip went back home to be with his family again. Having seen business opportunities in the postwar reconstruction, he set up his own accounting firm, in 1946, instead of joining established British firms at the time, such as Fleming & Williamson and Henry Hunter Bayne & Co.
The firm operated out of a small room on the fifth floor of the Trade and Commerce Building in Binondo, Manila. It steadily grew, and rechristened several times, from W. SyCip & Co., to SyCip Velayo Jose & Co., and to its current denomination, SyCip Gorres Velayo & Co. (SGV & Co.), to reflect the names of the new partners, Alfredo M. Velayo, a childhood friend of Mr. SyCip, and Ramon J. Gorres. SGV & Co. is now the largest multidisciplinary professional services firm in the
Mr. SyCip once said in a previous interview that his “usefulness to these large organizations is to enable them to get a viewpoint of someone who has read quite extensively and has time to analyze developments, and how [these] will affect this part of the world.” He often tells the story of how he foresaw the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank in the US, and warned local banks about it.
Philippines, with eight offices around the archipelago. It employs about 6,000 professionals who perform assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services with industry-leading competence. In 1996, the firm received an ISO 9001 certification, which is still in effect today, and, in 2002, it became a member practice of Ernst & Young Global Limited. SGV & Co. is also among the first Filipino companies to expand beyond the country’s borders by building a network of associated firms and partners in neighboring countries like Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, starting in the 1960s.
Mr. SyCip retired from SGV & Co. in 1996, but he still keeps an office on the 14th floor of one of the firm’s two buildings on Ayala Avenue, to which SGV transferred in 1965. And because of his role as member of dozens of corporate boards and organizational committees, his retirement has been particularly busy.
Mr. SyCip once said in a previous interview that his “usefulness to these large organizations is to enable them to get a viewpoint of someone who has read quite extensively and has time to analyze developments, and how [these] will affect this part of the world.” He often tells the story of how he foresaw the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank in the US, and warned local banks about it.
On top of advising businesses, Mr. SyCip is preoccupied with making the country a better place to live in, and he sometimes could be so concerned with the welfare of the nation and its citizens that he could make a married woman cry. In a recent interview, he mentioned an old phone conversation with Jose L. Cuisia, Jr. who earlier had accepted his appointment as Philippine Ambassador to the US, but had a problem with his wife who would not let him go. “He said, ‘ Wash, Can I send my wife to you on a Saturday?’ I said, ‘Of course’,” Mr. SyCip said. The wife came. “I told her, ‘It is not what you want, it is what the nation needs. And the nation needs your husband as ambassador.’ She left my house crying,” Mr. SyCip narrated. But after a few days, the wife sent Mr. SyCip a box of chocolates, and finally allowed her husband to leave.
To alleviate poverty, which affects millions of Filipinos despite the country’s abundance of human and natural resources, there are three areas that Mr. SyCip has been proposing to focus on — education, microfinance and rural health.
His profound interest on these prompted him to create a program called the Zero Dropout Education Scheme, which is implemented by an audit client of SGV & Co., the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development — Mutually Reinforcing Institutions (CARD MRI), a social development foundation established in 1986 which also provides microfinance services. The program’s goal is to send the poorest of the poor Filipino children to school and ensure that they complete at least their elementary education.
In another interview, Mr. SyCip spoke approvingly of the government’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program in which education grants, as well as health grants, are dispensed to impoverished families.
Mr. SyCip is grateful to the people he has partnered with in attaining his goals in the domains of education, microfinance and rural health. He has commended time and again Milwida Guevara, former undersecretary of finance who is now the head of Synergeia Foundation, a coalition that seeks to improve the quality of basic education in the country, for her honesty, as well as Jaime Aristotle Alip, founder of CARD MRI, for his expert knowledge in dealing with the typically poor individuals underserved or not served at all by big banking institutions. He would rather see these good people bask in the spotlight than himself.