Markets don't come any more emerging than East Timor. It was internationally recognized only as recently as May Eric Ellis reports on the unusual problems bankers face in the tiny new nation, which lies east of Java. Kirk McNamara has problems most retail bankers would love major traffic jams that gather outside his branch and its well-fingered ATM in downtown Dili, capital of the world's newest nation, East Timor.
So hectic in fact that in a languid South Seas town of few local customers, and fewer cars, Dili authorities have instituted traffic controls around the branch, and a one-way system on the through street to ease the crush. But McNamara has other problems that most bankers wouldn't want for love of their job, or the money, for that matter. Like the time last December when raging mobs beseiged Dili and the symbols of foreign business and East Timor's political leadership, both of which coalesced terrifyingly in the house he rents from East Timor's ruling Alkatiri family.
But when the rocks came through his front window, forcing him to beat a retreat to the safety of the nearby Australian Army barracks, it provided a moment when "I questioned my sanity". Almost a year later, McNamara semi-jokes about the riots now but at the time it had the effect of concentrating his mind, and the ANZ's, about continuing operations in East Timor.
Fire is something of a feature of banking in the wilds of East Timor. Just m down the road from McNamara's office is the branch of Banco Nacional Ultramarino, Portugal's state-owned overseas bank.
Today the BNU branch is one of Dili's biggest buildings, a gleaming four-storey model of possibility in what, just a year after independence from Indonesia, is one of the world's five poorest countries. Staff busy themselves processing telegraphic transfers and explaining the basics of banking to eager East Timorese. Its all a far cry from when the building, then a branch of an Indonesian bank, was set alight, gutted and pillaged of thousands of dollars, rupiahs and escudos after Jakarta-sponsored militias rampaged through Dili.
