During the past years, the staff at Bank of Asia have worked very hard to fulfill the Bank's vision: "To become the best Thai financial service center with a record of innovation, a reputation for professionalism and a practice founded upon the philosophy of doing right for our customers."

This vision, first enunciated in 1996, and which has given rise to the strategies we have pursued ever since, is one that everyone here fully embraces. With the advantage of this clear vision, we were able to move forward towards realizing the transformation of our banking business in advance of other financial institutions when the economy contracted. At that time, we recognized that the individual branch was the best channel to connect and build a relationship with our individual retail customers and, therefore, instigated our "Retail Transformation Program" at this level.

It took us about two years to transform our branches to conform to our new image. Gratifyingly, the public responded positively to these major changes at our branches: the redesign of their appearance, the change in atmosphere, the new IT systems platform, the interactive working processes, and the improved service delivery. As part of this transformation, back office operations moved out of the branches and were centralized at the Bank's Headquarters. This has allowed branch staff to dedicate themselves to sales and service while centralized teams focused on processing and product development.

The vision continues to serve Bank of Asia as we move into the second phase of our retail transformation through the ACU project, which is described in the following sections.