Assalamu alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.

It has been a few weeks now since Savings Consciousness Week came and went, observed every year since 1994, from June 30 to July 6. The banners have come down, the hashtags scrolled far down everyone’s feed. I stepped into this role only in July, shortly after the observance had closed, so much of what I know about it comes secondhand, which is perhaps why I keep thinking about it now, more carefully than I might have otherwise.

There is something useful about that distance. You skip the choreography of the week itself and go straight to the question that matters more: what remains once all of that has been packed away.

This observance is more than 30 years old, tracing back to a proclamation signed in 1976 by then President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr., later reissued in its current form in 1994. What it asked of Filipinos was simple, even if the goal was not: save consistently, and that habit, multiplied across millions of households, would help build the nation’s capital without the country having to borrow its way there. It called on government agencies, schools, and every level of society down to the barangay to spread that message.That is a lot to ask of one week, but maybe that was the point: a nudge meant to repeat every year, toward a habit that must outlive it.

I think about my own childhood whenever this observance comes around. When I wanted something then, like a toy or a pair of shoes, they will not simply hand it to me.The only way to get it was to save from my baon, counting whatever coins I had, again and again, checking how much closer I had gotten. It taught me, long before I understood the word for it, that wanting something and being willing to wait for it are two different disciplines, and the second is the harder, more useful one to build. That was exactly what that decades-old proclamation hoped every Filipino household would practice.

I have carried that instinct into two very different chapters of my career. As a former Secretary of Budget and Management, I spent years thinking about discipline at the scale of an entire nation, making sure every peso we spent had a clear reason. Now, as Chairperson and CEO (CCEO) of Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines, I think about that same discipline on a smaller, more personal scale, one savings account at a time.

Both ultimately reinforced a fundamental economics concept: a country grows steadier when it saves, and so does a child who issaving for something she wants.

Al-Amanah carries a particular piece of that story. We are the country’s only Islamic bank, operating under Shariah principles that treat a deposit not as a transaction but as a trust between the institution and the person who hands it to us. Many of the communities we serve, Filipino Muslims across Mindanao especially, have historically stayed outside the formal banking system this observance was meant to strengthen. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has found that in 2025, half of Filipino adults still do not own a formal financial account, and I suspect that number is higher still in the communities we were built for, shaped not just by distance from a branch, but by whether any bank ever offered them a way to save that made sense to them.

So, a month later, the questions I am left with are quieter, but harder to answer. Did the observance change a habit anywhere, or did it pass through the way a good sermon sometimes does, felt in the moment and forgotten by the following week? Are our nine branches, from Marawi to Zamboanga to Jolo, treating financial inclusion as something performed once a year, or as something owed every ordinary day in between?

I do not have a tidy answer, and I would rather sit with that honestly than offer a comfortable one. What I do believe is this: the patience I learned counting coins for something I wanted as a child, and the intent behind a decades-old proclamation, are, at their core, the same thing. Both understood that a nation grows strong quietly, coin by coin, deposit by deposit, long before anyone notices it has become strong at all.

Beyond budget, beyond the campaign calendar, that habit of quiet, patient saving deserves to outlast its own observance. As the first woman CCEO of Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines, that is the standard I want this institution to live up to. As CCEO, I will keep asking whether the habit that one week is meant to inspire is still alive in every week that follows it, especially in the communities that have waited longest for a bank willing to meet them there.