Unless you’re positioned to be the next Celso de los Angeles, banking – let alone rural banking – can be quite a bore.

For one, you need only P2.8 million to set up a bank in some sixth-class municipality out in the styx. For another, your biggest competitor, if not another rural bank, is an Indian riding his motorbike to collect his 5-6 at the end of the day.

And yet, according to Tomas Gomez IV, president of the Rural Bankers Association of the Philippines, the largest rural bank in the Philippines has a capital base of P10 billion and 80 branches, most of them in Mindanao (its owners are Christian, not Muslim). On top of these unboring facts, the bank is headquartered in highly, highly urbanized Makati!

The Rural Bank of Makati was born in the ‘50s, long before Makati became the Ayala-Binay metropolis that it is today. Parañaque, likewise, hosts a rural bank for the same reason.

Stranger things have happened. For example, Mr. Gomez told Bulong Pulungan at Sofitel hotel, during the eight or 10 months that Mr. De los Angeles’ temporary restraining order (TRO) against Bangko Sentral was in effect, Legacy’s rural banks generated P1.3 billion in deposits.

There’s gold in the boondocks, indeed. A total of 6 million depositors provide rural banks their bread and butter, to the tune of P120 billion.

Their interest rates are “a little higher” at both ends, for borrowers and depositors.

Now that ATMs and mobile phone banking are available in the countryside, the association anticipates industry growth. With a little help from and more supervision by the central bank, it should take a longer time before the next Celso de los Angeles gives rural banking a bad name again.