As the 31st in a long line of presidents and managing directors of the 165-year-old Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), the country’s oldest bank, Cezar P. Consing likes to say he has a simple job. “You have to understand how we have always thought in this bank,” says the 55-year-old CEO who is an avid runner. “It’s a relay race. My job is just to make sure when I hand this off to my successor, it’s in better shape than when I got it. It’s simple as that.”

But it never really is, as Consing himself is the first to admit. Amid unprecedented growth in lending since 2013 when he was appointed BPI president, the banks’ profit margins are being squeezed. In just three years, the bank’s loan book almost doubled from Php500 billion in 2012 to almost Php900 billion last year.

“You have all this growth and yet banks have been under some pressure,” Consing says as he sums up the challenge facing the bank, the country’s third largest by asset size. “The growth rate is one thing but if you look at returns of equity of banks, globally and locally, they have been trending down.” The bank’s return on equity fell to 12.3% last year from 18.1% three years ago.

Another sign of the pressures weighing on banks’ return on capital is the modest growth in banks’ market capitalization compared with other companies in recent years. “I think other industries took advantage of (the recent growth) probably more than the banks.”

Indeed, while banks’ market capitalization rose by 16.7% between 2012 and 2015, the value of holding firms surged by 54.6% during the same period, growing at least three times faster. Property companies’ market capitalization also grew by 41.3%, or almost two and a half times faster than banks.