Bruce Bowen, president and CEO of Scotia Group Jamaica, in his Kingston office. - Photo by Laura Tanna
Jamaican verandas have been abuzz with talk since William 'Bill' Clarke stepped down as president and CEO of Scotia Group Jamaica Limited last October, several years before he was due to retire. Now news headlines follow the ensuing legal drama which threatens to play out in public. So when the Financial Gleaner asked me to interview Clarke's successor, Bruce Bowen, I admit to sharing the country's curiosity as to what kind of man, a foreigner at that, would be willing to step into what could be an extremely controversial situation.
Bowen, disarmingly down-to-earth, answered questions about his family background with a good-natured smile as he spoke of his upbringing in St Catherines, Ontario, between Toronto and Niagara Falls, where he was born in 1961.
"It was an auto town of 100,000 people or so. General Motors had an engine plant there which really drove the economy," he recalls.
Middle-class area
His own neighbourhood "was a middle-class area. A lot of people immigrated there 10 or 15 years before - Eastern Europeans, Syrians - new immigrants who came over in the '40s and '50s had started earning money and were moving into the middle class. It was a sort of farm area that had been taken over by suburbs."
As to his own family's ancestry, he says on his mother Beryl's side, he is distantly related to Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The Bells and his maternal grandfather were among "a bunch of orphans who were sent from England to Canada in the early 1900s to work in the farming industry, basically as labourers." Bowen has been told his family name is either Scottish or Welsh and it may have been because his paternal grandfather was in trucking and doing business with the United States that his grandmother comes from Montana, in the US. Other family members worked in Detroit and the docks, where ships went through the Great Lakes.
Of his father, Bowen notes: "Most entrepreneurs fail many times before they succeed so I remember going through periods where business ventures had failed and it was eating luncheon meat!" But eventually Frank Bowen and a partner set up what became the largest freight forwarding company in Canada, Inter-American Transport Systems, doing business in Canada, the US and Mexico. His parents eventually sold out to a large US company, started a few small transport-related businesses then sold those to his only sibling, a younger brother. Bruce Bowen became one of the first family members not to go into the transport business, something he attributes to getting practical work experience before finishing university.
Played high school sports
Bowen says: "In high school I played American football, hockey, did gymnastics, rowing. I did all kinds of things and was not the top in anything but always was good enough to get on the school teams." Raised a Lutheran, religion was a big part of growing up. His mother's father sang in the choir and Sunday was church day. Bowen, active in the youth group, explains: "It was part of the expectation that you did your time as an acolyte lighting candles and that sort of thing. We were avid members of the church. My parents have stayed very active." He thinks of both his parents as being very responsible and says of his father: "A bit of a workaholic, which I guess all of us have some element of that. And very strict. On the other hand, he would always give me a lot of responsibility to the extent that I showed I could handle it." Apparently Bowen handled it well for when business caused his parents and brother to move out of town his last year in high school, he remembers: "I was always pretty independent and was able to convince them that I was mature enough at 16 to stay on my own. I would never, ever let any of my kids do that."
Bowen received a scholarship from Queen's University inKingston, Ontario: "I was interested in engineering and had been told that was the way to move up in General Motors. Even though none of my family worked for General Motors, in the community I grew up, that was deemed to be the big job. After I got to Queen's University, I said: 'Is this really what I want to do with my life? Or am I just pursuing this because I was told that's how to get to the top of General Motors?' I had very high grades, so even though I left [Queen's] after less than a year, it was pretty easy to get a job. So I actually worked for Brown & Root Engineering for a year and decided I didn't want to be an engineer.
"There's some saying about when luck and opportunity meet: When I started I had just turned 18 and within less than 12 months was managing material control for a big job site, a polyvinyl chloride polyethylene plant that was being built for Dow Chemical. I had 15 to 20 unionised pipe fitters working for me and I figured this management thing is a whole lot better than being out in the snow counting pipes as an engineer, so that's what motivated me.
"It was an amazing learning experience because you couldn't manage through intimidation and telling them what to do, so I spent a lot of time asking them about the business. They knew nothing about how to run the office but knew much more about the materials and what was actually in the warehouse than me. I found that by spending a lot of time asking them about it, they would enjoy telling me about it. My management approach obviously couldn't be hierarchical. It had to be much more: 'We're working together.'"
People-focused
Has this influenced his management style now? "Sure. I've always been sort of people-focused and been able to work with diverse groups of people. Probably it stems back to that. I didn't have a choice in that situation. I didn't try anything different but I guess I'm smart enough to know if I had, it wouldn't have worked well."
Here I couldn't help thinking of Jamaican-born Bromley Armstrong describing to me his experiences as a young man learning to cope with unionised workers in Canada. But whereas Armstrong was an immigrant himself, Bowen was already rooted in Canadian culture, so rooted in fact that he married at age 19 and restarted his higher education at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton near where his job was located, then moved closer to home for his second year of university where he obtained his degree in business administration at Wilfred Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario. After graduation he joined Continental Bank of Canada which was taken over in 1986 by Lloyds of Canada which itself was taken over by the Hong Kong Bank of Canada in 1990.
Located in the city of Kitchener, a half-hour from Toronto, Bowen left the bank and with a partner started a Merchant Bank. He recalls: "Back then that was a real sexy business. It was exciting: big money and all that. You're young and think you're brighter than everyone else. I didn't have much of any money when I started but put everything I had into it and did very well when I left. My partner and I just decided that we weren't cut out to be partners. We both kind of jumped into it without a lot of understanding of the importance of the dynamics. We knew each other professionally. Respected each other's skills in different areas.
Partnership broke up
He was from a family that had a fair bit of money. Most of the money going into it was theirs, so when we decided to break up the partnership … We had what they call a shotgun agreement that one of us has to buy the other one out and clearly that wasn't going to be me. So there was a formula that he bought me out and I had a non-competition in capital markets, so I was looking for a banking business, ideally something outside of the Metro Toronto area. Scotiabank International Banking was looking for someone so that's how I got to Scotiabank.
"I originally worked for three years in Toronto in international banking, dealing with a European operation and some things in the Far East, and then I went to Cayman in 1993 where we did domestic banking, and banking for large multinationals that needed offshore accounts. We also did project finance for the region."
Leaving the big city of Toronto for Cayman at a time when the population there was perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 people was something of a shock to Bowen and he admits he enjoyed getting off to travel every four to six weeks.
Single again by the time he moved to Cayman after his marriage of 10 years ended, in part Bowen says because, "I was very focused on getting ahead and much less family-oriented than I have since become. In my marriage with Suzanne we're very family focused. Maybe one of the lessons learned from the first relationship is that you can't be solely focused on work."
Married trinidadian
Promoted to general manager of the corporate and commercial banking department at the Trinidad and Tobago office of Bank of Nova Scotia, Bowen moved to Trinidad in 1996 and lived there for three years. It was in Trinidad that he met Suzanne Oliverri Fernando, a Trinidadian, who also has children from a first marriage. After his first posting here in 1999, they were married in Jamaica and he makes the point: "We always refer to our children because they view themselves as part of a family unit; Suzanne and I and the five kids."
Krystian, 21, Kandiss, 26 and Kari, 30 are already adults living in Toronto. Katherine and Mackenzie are at the point of applying to universities and Bowen admits: "I go through periods where I think that they have too much choice and I should be more directive, but in the end I back away from that position. I try to make sure that they're keeping their options as wide as they can."
Our initial interview on January 20 dealing with his personal development ended as Bowen, CEO of Jamaica's most profitable bank, was called away to a meeting with the governor of the Bank of Jamaica. Part two will be business: Canada's role in Scotia Group Jamaica.