Leading Digital Adoption: Unionbank Celebrates 39th Anniversary

 

 

Digital banking has made the challenging days of the pandemic a little bearable. AI and block chain has also been useful to transform this all as Unionbank leads the way for the digital adoption of the Philippines. They are currently celebrating their 39th Anniversary and with this, they continue their mission to spearhead digital banking technology with you their customers in mind. They are also making good headway.

Mr. Henry Aguda the SVP and Chief Technology and Operations Officer + Chief Transformation Officer for Unionbank says "Exciting things are happening with Unionbank as we celebrate our 39th anniversary. Our celebration started with the Unionbank SME Business Banking app. We currently rank 2nd in Instapay which means we are second with regards to usage among other companies. This allows our SME's to have banking capabilities just like the big boys. We also launched BUX and it has already 50K onboard. We also launched SeekCap and Sentro so SME's can get capital and sell bulk as they scale products into the market."

They also addressed Senator Sherwin Gatchalian's case and said "We value the privacy of the good Senator and we have made warnings for our other clients. These hackers prey on emotion, use other sites or emails, use and copy Unionbank's logo to do phishing. While we cannot disclose details, we are working with authorities to run after them. It is not a security hack. We have the transaction details and logs and we are not resting til they are held accountable. We are working on it til now. We ensure the processes are logged to protect our clients. It's a shared responsibility of both us and our clients, so make sure you use different emails for online banking and the regular work. "

"Are we ready? Yes, we have the support of our regulators and a framework that requires us to report incidents like these. There are a couple of bad actors/criminals that make this difficult but we do not succumb to them. It has increased the awareness of our customer base, we are becoming vigilant, to more digital transactions with multiple validations. They will only prey on the weak, but everybody is coming together to push out these criminals out of the banking industry."

"We went through this digital transformation 4 years back. We made sure we prepared for AI. We created the organization to aggregate more information and curating them with other agencies and corporations in  compliance with the National Privacy Commission. It's a long journey but now we are here. We are going to tailor fit customer products that are most relevant to our customers. This also protects transactions going to the bank. From laundering, to fraud, this is anticipated as patterns, all of which are in the initial stages. Our advocacy is to be more sophisticated than criminals, AI is helping us with that. We are now at 170 institutions and continue to scale up, Unionbank has launched PHX. We hope to share this with the government and our corporate clients."

When asked about education campaigns for less tech inclined customers, he says "The best awareness campaign is making the app as easy to use as possible. We took a look at our GSIS customers and worried they won't be able to use the app, our program "Convert" taught them to use the digital platform. Now they can bank at the comforts of their home, but most of them still prefer to go to the branch. When we got them onboard though, they became our ambassadors."

Their mandate today is to move the Filipino into the digital space. Their platform made it possible to reach a lot of people. They are one of the most successful banks in the ASEAN and this transformation has driven them to do it til now.

Unionbank is excited to continue to advocate digital banking services. The end goal is where their customers would move to. Nobody gets left behind. They could move much faster but they have customers who prefer the personalized service is. They are still there servicing customers during the pandemic, the branches have been able to accommodate seniors. They are letting their customers grow with them, and that's a good thing.

You'll see more of that.