AFoCR Leading Project to Reconconstruct Wilson Monument in Prague.
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Jack Stack
AFoCR Director Jack Stack served until 2007 as Chairman and CEO of Ceska Sporitelna bank. During his term, Mr. Stack was one of the best known foreign businessmen in the Czech Republic. As well as being personally popular, he was also admired for having turned around the bank's fortunes. When he took the helm at the turn of the decade, it was deeply in the red. Today, it is making billions of crowns in profits.
Behind the boom is a dramatic reform of Czech banking in which yet another American transplant, Mr. Stack, played a leading role. Like the rest of the banking system during the Communist era, Ceska Sporitelna, a savings institution founded in 1825, had fallen under state control. After the Velvet Revolution, Czech banks were expected to adapt quickly to the new market economy. Instead, corruption and chaos ensued. In the early 1990s, many businesses were privatized by shady promoters who secretly sold off the most valuable parts of the firms. They then took out bank loans on the companies' money-losing remains, never intending to make repayments. In other cases, politicians pressured banks to make loans to large companies whose managers could deliver their employees' votes in elections.
By 1999, almost half of all bank loans had failed. It was then that Mr. Stack, a lifelong New Yorker and veteran banker, decided to plunge into Prague's murky financial waters. He had spent more than two decades at Chemical Bank (now part of JP Morgan Chase) in a variety of management positions. Once installed, he decided to draw on measures that had worked well at Chemical Bank.
The same sorts of reforms have since spread throughout Prague's banking system. For Mr. Stack, the secret of the Czech banking system's success was to tap consumer demand that had been pent up for decades. Mortgages in Prague began growing and bank loans to small and medium-sized businesses began growing substantially as well.
