Pub.7 2018 Issue 4

17 w i n t e r | 2018 Sometimes, the ATMs ran dry, and it was normal to see lines of customers wrapped around the block. "You could fill those machines up and the money would go like that," Alvarez said, snap- ping his fingers. "We weren't panicking, but we were concerned that we needed cash." Many ATMs were not operational. At Popular, Alvarez described a return to "old-fashioned" banking in the first days after the storm — including hand-written I.O.U.s. "There were no systems, no nothing. We had a couple of branches where people were really in need of money. And we had to give the instruction that anybody who showed up with a Popular debit card, give them $100 against an I.O.U.," he said. "At the end of the day I think we lost less than $5,000 on that. People were very honest and we had cases where somebody would say 'I only have $60 in the bank so don't give me $100.' But it was a desperate time. In the aftermath of the storm, cash is king. People needed money." Banks on the island began holding daily phone calls with U.S. federal banking and credit union regulators, the U.S. Treasury, Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and EVERTEC Inc., the com- pany that manages cash on behalf of the Federal Reserve in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican banks are subject to the same federal regulations as their mainland counterparts; they are also regulated locally by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions of Puerto Rico. The first order of business was to make sure the island had enough cash, according to Joyner, the island's financial commissioner, who was also on the calls. "The New York Fed had already pre- positioned about $350 million here in Puerto Rico in the reserve," Joyner said. "After the hurricane struck, they were able to get another $700 million in here within a week. It came in on pallets on one of the relief flights." Joyner describes these calls as "very open." "Everybody was talking about their branch networks and what they were doing and how they were going to move cash around," he recalls. "We had the armored car company also involved in the calls. And so it was a lot of differ- ent people from a lot of different sectors coming together all cooperating with each other." A Popular bank branch in San Juan, a year after Hurricane Maria. Source: Lindsey White Data compiled on Oct. 3, 2018. B ranch data based on the FDIC’s Summary of Deposits filling as of June 30, 2018, and adjusted for completed a nd announced M&A and any branch openings or closings as of Oct 3, 2018. P ro forms branch data collected on a best-efforts basis. Excludes credit unions and cooperatives. Map credit: Elizabeth Thomas S ource: S&P Global Market Intelligence F E A T U R E