Graphic from THEPHILBIZNEWS
By Victoria “NIKE” De Dios
The ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) welcomed the inclusion of the country’s most innovative bank, RCBC among the four new members of the API Exchange of the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) during the Singapore FinTech Festival.
AFIN was established as a non-profit organization in 2018 by the ASEAN Bankers Association (ABA), International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). AMTD Foundation and Mastercard are AFIN’s Corporate Founding Members.
“This is another step towards further promoting open banking regime in the Philippines by way of strategic collaboration with regional and global players. It perfectly aligns with the objective of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas on creating an open finance framework to support the country’s massive digitalization push,” Eugene S. Acevedo, RCBC president and CEO said.
APIX, the flagship product of ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN), is a global cloud-based platform that enables financial institutions and fintechs to discover one another on a curated global marketplace, design experiments collaboratively in the sandbox and deploy innovative solutions quickly at a lower cost.
Once registered with the APIN platform, RCBC may already access various services from the APIX Community Platform, a network to share ideas, solutions and market opportunities. It also includes the APIX Global FinTech Marketplace where a member can ideate on business problems and search for pre-built solutions; and the APIX Sandbox: in which you can publish and distribute or find and subscribe to API services, experiment, test, collaborate around the development of new services, using development tools, integration services, synthetic data and standard banking API simulators.
The very encouraging Philippine digital landscape allows RCBC to position itself strategically. Against the COVID-19 backdrop, there has been a growing consumers’ digital adoption supported by the government’s aggressive digital transformation push, the series of enabling laws and regulations passed and issued such as the open finance or open banking framework, digital bank licensing, the three-year digital payments transformation roadmap, and various pending bills on virtual banking and fintech, among others.
“From growth to Hypergrowth. This is everyone’s aspiration. And RCBC is poised to go that route, to experience rapid, exponential progress in this digital realm. But this can be achieved with a well-defined digital roadmap, a digital-centric organization, and of course a strategic collaboration,” Lito Villanueva, RCBC executive vice president and chief innovation and inclusion officer said.
RCBC’s collaboration agenda with APIX will fuel this aspiration in delivering speed and scale. It has received six global and regional digital recognitions within the nine-month quarantine period including being named as the Philippines’ best digital bank by Asiamoney. It recorded two to four-digit exponential growth in its digital channels both in volume and in value at the height of the pandemic. It also launched the fast growing first Taglish inclusion super app DiskarTech in the middle of the lockdown. So far, over 3 million downloads have been registered just four months from launch with 64 percent monthly active user rate and social media positive sentiment rating of 98 percent. Total disbursements through its digital channels exceed P11 billion benefiting close to 3 million families or covering almost 15 million individuals across 72 out of 81 provinces.
FinTechs around the world and Financial Institutions are eligible to apply for the APIX platform. Fintechs can publish their APIs and consume other Users’ APIs. For Financial Institutions (FIs) are considered those service providers licensed in a given jurisdiction by a relevant authority to provide financial services to consumers or business users. In their role as FIs, prospective Users are eligible to apply if they are using the APIX Platform for service developments in any of the 22 global jurisdictions that includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Thailand, Tonga, Vanuatu, Vietnam.
The other new members include TymeBank from South Africa, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF)
RCBC is a multi-awarded digital-centric universal bank which recently bagged six regional and global accolades including being cited as the Best Digital Bank in the Philippines for 2020 by Asiamoney and Southeast Asia Alpha awards.
