Paradise Is a Company Town

Colorful birds flit around in spacious aviaries. An open-air zoo has monkeys, emus and a lioness with her cubs. Fra grant flowers line the streets. This is the "City of God," eleven miles from Sao Paulo in Brazil. With a school, a hospital and all other things for the material needs of its 1,200-odd inhabitants, it is the headquarters community built by Brazil's liveliest and fastest-growing bank: Banco Brasileiro de Descontos, or Bradesco as it is commonly known.

Beneath its blandly bucolic skin, Bradesco hides tough sinews. South America's most elaborate computer system operates 24 hours a day in the City of God. Helicopters and a bristling network of rooftop antennas link the city with many of Bradesco's 327 branches, spread over south and central Brazil. Seventeen radio stations keep the bank's executives in constant touch with remote offices. While most of Brazil's musty banks know where they stand only two or three times a month, Bradesco directors in the 13-story headquarters building in the City of God scan yesterday's balance sheets with their morning coffee.

From Broom to Pencil. Such modern techniques, combined with fast reaction to loan requests and an unusual willingness to take chances, have pushed Bradesco from nowhere 25 years ago into a commanding position as Brazil's biggest private bank--second in size to the federal government's bank. It now has deposits of $175 million, serves 1,200,000 customers and claims 174,000 shareholders, including all of its 8,064 employees.

All this is the accomplishment of a lean, handsome Brazilian named Amador Aguiar, 64, the son of peasants and a school dropout who got his start sweeping the floors of a small-town bank. Soon he handed in his broom for an accountant's pencil and, when his boss fled with the cash, moved up to manager. In 1943, with the assist of a few friends and $3,000 capital, he struck out on his own.

From the beginning, his bank concentrated on the rural areas in the inte rior, financing coffee growers and cattlemen. Bradesco endeared itself to its distant customers by such services as providing them with needed supplies and taking care of their bills and taxes in the capital. As the interior developed, Bradesco thrived and helped open more territories for cultivation, notably in the north of Parana state, now Brazil's richest coffee-producing area. "The sky is the limit," says Aguiar. "Now we have many more resources. We can do much more."

Peasant Philosophy. A Presbyterian and strong believer in simplicity and solidarity--what he likes to call "peasant philosophy"--Aguiar found city life incompatible with his principles. "I need a place with the healthy atmosphere of the interior," he explains. This is what he achieved by building his own company town and calling it City of God. He recalls: "They all said we were mad. The roads were so bad that when it rained hard our city became unreachable even by Jeep. We had no communications, no telephone." That was 15 years ago. When 40,000 people poured into town last week to celebrate the founding anniversary and jestful employees threw Aguiar into a swimming pool, he vowed to build an even bigger and better City of God.

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