UnionBank has partnered Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) to successfully complete a proof of concept (POC) for the issuance of a retail bond on a digital platform leveraging blockchain technology for bond tokenisation. The 3 and 5.25-year dual tranche issuance totaling PHP 9 billion by UnionBank was successfully mirrored on the platform co-created by UnionBank and SC Ventures, the innovation and ventures arm of Standard Chartered. Orders received were tokenised, and to stay within existing retail bond guidelines, tokens issued mirrored the traditional transaction but were not allocated directly to investors. SC Ventures built the bond tokenisation platform making the process…

Mastercard has announced a five-year partnership with PayMongo, a Filipino online payment platform, that allows businesses to quickly set up payment systems and accept multiple modes of payment such as cards, e-wallets and other alternative payment options. The strategic partnership with Mastercard will strengthen PayMongo’s business offerings by enabling the latter to be a Mastercard issuer to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Orchestrating this partnership is Mastercard Fintech Express, a tailored programme which provides fintechs such as PayMongo with increased speed-to-market, access to a suite of digital-first products, and a cross functional team of experts to provide strategic counsel and…

Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) and the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) will collaborate for an efficient and quick digital disbursement of cash assistance to displaced local and overseas workers affected by the COVID 19 pandemic. The funds will be disbursed through InstaPay bank transfers and RCBC’s DiskarTech app to the targeted beneficiaries as identified and verified by DOLE. Another disbursement mode would be through RCBC DiskarTech’s payout partners in 72 out of 81 provinces nationwide for beneficiaries without existing bank accounts. The cash assistance will be deposited to the individual beneficiary’s DiskarTech account or claimed through payout partners…

Philippine fintech startup JazzyPay has partnered with e-wallet GCash to provide cashless payment solutions to essential businesses. The GCash payment facility is now directly integrated into JazzyPay’s PCI DSS Level 1 compliant platform as a payment method for hospitals, clinics, schools, and other businesses across the Philippines. Prior to the pandemic, the digital payments space in the Philippines had already seen prominent growth in 2019, where credit and debit card transactions rose by 18 percent and 15 percent respectively. Meanwhile, e-money transactions recorded a 36 percent growth. Now, as the pandemic causes Filipinos to be more dependent on using cashless alternatives…

Though in the Philippines fintech is still in the infancy stage, adoption of digital financial services is on the rise. COVID-19 is further accelerating consumers’ shift to digital channels. A survey conducted earlier this year by PayPal showed that 87% of Filipinos increased their usage of digital payments during the pandemic. An overwhelming 99% said they plan to keep using digital payments even after community quarantines are eased. While COVID-19 increased usage of fintech services, the volume of ATM withdrawals on the other hand dropped by almost 30% for the first 45 days of the enhanced community quarantine, according to…

The Philippines is home to a striving fintech industry comprising more than 190 ventures operating in lending, payments, credit scoring, and more and the top funded fintech startups in the Philippines gives us a sense of what investors and startups believe to the biggest opportunities within the ecosystem. As the momentum continues, we look today at some of the Philippines most successful and most well-funded fintech startups. For this list, we’ve used figures provided by the companies themselves or from startup data providers such as Crunchbase, Dealroom and Pitchbook. Coins.ph – US$82 million Coins.ph is a blockchain-backed platforms whose mobile…

​The Monetary Board approved the recognition of digital bank as a new bank category that is separate and distinct from the existing bank classifications.  A digital bank is defined as a bank that offers financial products and services that are processed end-to-end through a digital platform and/or electronic channels with no physical branches. This is after teasing its release for the past few months. The Philippines central bank is the latest to approve the framework following the footsteps of its Singaporean and Hong Kong counterparts and Malaysia is who is currently still in draft stages. The new policy forms part of…

tonik, the Philippines’ digital-only neobank, announced its collaboration with solutions provider CRIF for the automation of its loan origination and collection systems. tonik is set to launch a full range of banking services including a transactional savings account, time deposit accounts with attractive interest rates, as well as consumer loans in Q1 2021. Additional services such as debit MasterCard, credit cards, and fund transfer transactions will be made available over the course of the next years. The partnership will reportedly enable tonik to increase its efficiency, and minimise its costs and risks in credit decision making and collection. CRIF will be…

Philippine mobile money wallet GCash was among the top apps in terms of active users from January to September 2020 in both Android and iOS. This was revealed by the data rankings from App Annie, a reputable global app ranking authority. GCash registered a whopping 130 percent active user growth in September compared to the beginning of the year. GCash also noted that monthly downloads in the recent months have peaked to up to 270 percent as compared to early 2020. GCash reportedly has over 26 million users at present. “We at GCash are proud of this milestone, as we…

Home-grown oil company Phoenix Petroleum Philippines has expanded its contactless payment service to more than 200 of its gas stations nationwide. From the initial 100 stations offering payments through Gcash, Grabpay, Alipay, and WeChat Pay, the service has now been implemented in 160 stations in Luzon, 47 stations in Metro Manila, 18 stations in Visayas and 22 stations in Mindanao. So far, Phoenix has processed around 30,000 contactless payment transactions at its stations since the service was launched in June. The service is part of the company’s extensive campaign to help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, which may…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has hailed the central bank’s move to cap charges on credit card transactions, raising its hopes that similar limits will soon apply to consumer and payday loans offered by lending and financing companies. On September 25, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced that the Monetary Board approved an annual interest rate ceiling of 24% on all credit card transactions effective November 3, 2020. The new policy also provides that interest rates or finance charges on the unpaid outstanding credit card balance of a cardholder should not exceed 2% per month. For credit card…

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has imposed an interest rate cap of 2% a month or 24% annually starting 3 November 2020 onwards. “Starting on this date, interest or finance charges on unpaid outstanding credit card balance should not exceed 24% annually or two percent per month. The monthly add-on rate for credit card installment loans should not exceed 1% per month; and the processing fee on the availment of credit card cash advances should not exceed P200 per transaction,” said Benjamin E. Diokno, Governor of BSP. In line with this, the BSP issued a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)…

JazzyPay, a local fintech company, announced its partnership with the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) enabling Filipinos to make secure online payments to essential businesses. JazzyPay offers an online payment gateway system that allows businesses to collect payments via 27 payment methods, including credit and debit cards, online banking, e-wallets, and over-the-counter cash deposits. The strategic partnership with BPI, a commercial bank in the Philippines, will empower BPI’s online banking users to make cashless payments to JazzyPay’s partner merchants. According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), electronic fund transfers rose by 74% in volume during the enhanced community…

Fintech Alliance.ph joins 25 members from the Philippine Business Groups (PBS) to organise a convocation in support of the government’s “Ambisyon Natin 2040” initiative amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. A manifesto of support will be presented via Zoom and Facebook live at 12 noon on November 5, 2020. Fintech Alliance.ph is an industry interest group comprised of fintech companies that believe in the opportunities through continuous engagement in building and expanding a sustainable digital finance ecosystem. The Ambisyon Natin 2040 is a collective long-term vision of the kind of life that the Filipino people want for themselves and the country in…

PayMongo, a Manila-based online payment processing platform, announced its partnership with Vesta, a fintech focused on fraud detection for e-commerce payment solutions, to further enhance the company’s advanced fraud detection capabilities. The partnership adds fraud assessment to protect customers’ accounts and enable real-time reporting for PayMongo’s merchants comprising mostly of small and medium Filipino enterprises. PayMongo also offers merchants waived sign-up and monthly fees, providing a quick and automated onboarding process and seamless API integration for those with website or apps, as well as letting them accept digital payments such as credit and debit cards and e-wallets through its PayMongo…

The current COVID-19 health crisis is unprecedented in its scope, impacting all countries and the world’s economy at large. In banking, COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to digital, pushing customers towards mobile banking and contactless payments. For financial institutions, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for digital transformation, revealing how outdated current processes were and how badly they needed to change their value propositions. As part of the “Redefining Finance for Good” series, we spoke to Lito Villanueva, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer at Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC), one of the top ten lenders in…

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) Governor Benjamin Diokno indicated that improving the financial inclusion landscape can aid in the recovery of the domestic economy from the pandemic. In a taped speech during the Pru Life UK Online Investment briefing, he said “financial inclusion has become a compelling strategy for sustainable growth.” Diokno mentioned that the government’s efforts to include more Filipinos into the financial system are now bearing fruit as shown partly by the increase in the number of people who now own financial accounts, primarily electronic money (e-money) accounts. Citing the results of the 2019 Financial Inclusion Survey (FIS),…

Most of the Litex Market’s vendors at Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City seem to have embraced digital payments with the aid of Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation’s (RCBC) DiskarTech app. They reported that about 197 out of 200 vendors have downloaded the app for their transactions. These vendors join the growing number of “Negosyantech”, in the country. It is a coined word referring to an entrepreneur who embraces technology. They belong to the 70% unbanked and underserved sector whom RCBC would like to reach out to as a commitment to financial inclusion for Filipinos. “They were left out of this move to…

In the Philippines, the upcoming digital banking framework will trigger a wave of innovation and help address financial exclusion, experts said. During a recent webinar, experts representing CIMB Bank, RCBC, Finastra and Microsoft, discussed the forthcoming digital banking license, arguing that the entrance of new, tech-driven players will shake up the industry for the better. “This is a positive move to welcome new players, specially tech players, who can bring in new ways of doing things in a more advanced way,” Vijay Manoharan, CEO of CIMB Bank Philippines, said during the webinar. “Overall, I expect this to improve the user…

FICO, a global analytics software firm, has released its Identity in Digital Banking Survey, which found that the complexity and cost of validating the identity of digital banking customers are the top pain points for banks in the Philippines. Almost 50% of respondents surveyed nominated the ‘high level of manual processes to validate customer identities’ as their top challenge along with ‘consistent collection of supporting data/documents’ and the ‘need for physical validation of identity’. The ‘time taken to verify identity’ and the ‘cost of third-party verification services’ were nominated by more than 40% of respondents. “Identity challenges are intensifying with…