Ben D. Kritz
It is probably no accident that Vittorio Almario is the president of the Rural Bankers Association of the Philippines (RBAP). He is the second-generation head of the Rural Bank of Mati, a largely family-owned rural bank founded in 1959 with a single office—to this day, the only office the bank has—in the capital of Davao Oriental. Almario’s bank is the archetype of the original idea behind the rural banking system when it was first conceived in 1952: A system that would provide one bank in every community in the Philippines by encouraging the “financially capable” leading families in the provinces to set them up.