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Philippines’ RCBC and DTI To Enable Digital Payments For Micro-Businesses

Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has partnered to create DiskarTech’s NegosyanTech programme to digitalise community-based microenterprises in every barangay nationwide through partnership and ecosystem building.

More than 1.3 million sari-sari stores (a Tagalog word that locals use for convenience stores) and market vendors, as well as an estimated 7 million informal and unregistered home-based microbusinesses stand to benefit from this programme.

With the use of DiskarTech, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) will now be able to accept digital payments through their own unique QR codes. These digital payments will be deposited into their DiskarTech savings accounts that will earn a competitive 3.25% annual interest.

Ramon Lopez

“As DTI partners with DiskarTech’s pioneering app, we welcome the complete suite of digital financial services that will indeed benefit our MSMEs. We are thankful that they will be able to help more than 1.3 million sari-sari stores and market vendors in over 42,000 barangays,”

said DTI Secretary Ramon Lopez.

DiskarTech’s NegosyanTech “paki-suyo” services using the mobile app will also provide new income streams to MSMEs by performing financial transactions on behalf of their customers. These transactions include top-up of airtime load, gaming pins, and prepaid electricity, bills payment, fund transfer, purchase of insurance products, cash in and loan repayment, and cash out or withdrawal.

Lito Villanueva

“Paki-suyo” has been showcased as among Filipino cultural values at the height of the lockdown showing one’s empathy or malasakit. Through DiskarTech, our entrepreneurs will be ahead of the game with innovative features available in the app as they display Filipinos’ brand of resiliency and ingenuity amidst the pandemic,”

Lito Villanueva, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer of RCBC.

DiskarTech will soon introduce a loans marketplace catering to all sectors such as formal and informal workers, MSMEs, displaced overseas Filipinos, and smallholder farmers and fishers, among others in collaboration with government and private sector lenders.

DiskarTech recently made history as the fastest local finance app to reach one million downloads just 38 days from its market launch. For over a month now, it has kept its ranking as the top app among free finance mobile apps in Google Play Store and second in Apple App Store.