A recap of “Digital Banking Solutions Series on Platforms - Part I" webinar

The SME Finance Forum is hosting a two-session webinar series on Digital Banking Solutions. At the first webinar of the series, we examined how financial institutions connect to fintechs through platforms and can realize the potential of new solutions in SME Finance.

First, Matthew Saal, Head of Digital Finance, Financial Institutions Group at IFC, discussed the progression and shift in approach by many fintechs from go-it-alone to partnering with banks to achieve scale. While many of the fintechs were interested in larger markets, there was an opportunity to connect fintechs and banks in smaller markets as well. The ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) partnership was created to address this issue, specifically to facilitate market access for fintechs to more markets, help financial institutions (FIs) to experiment quickly with different fintech companies and to allow regulators to learn more about these innovations, as they develop their approach to regulate these solutions. 

Manish Diwaan, Managing Director of AFIN, described APIX the platform created by AFIN as an online global marketplace and sandbox for collaboration between FIs and fintechs. Diwaan stated: “Financial services are moving away from building to partnering instead, as it’s better to partner with someone who does it better than me. But, the collaboration between fintech and FIs is not without its difficulties.” There’s a lot of wasted time in developing a partnership with the biggest issues being access to partners, the time to secure the meetings with proof of concept, and the long approval process. The APIX platform solves a number of these problems, allowing FIs to have unlimited experimentation with several specialized fintechs, reducing the timeline from many months to just a number of weeks.  

Union Bank of the Philippines is a financial institution that is utilizing this platform as part of its transformation strategy. Ricardo Jose "Dodge" V. Ronquillo, Head of FinTech Synergies & Integrations in the FinTech team of UnionBank of the Philippines (UPB), shared details on how they work with fintechs through the platform. As part of their current strategy, they work with a growing number of fintechs in order to democratize banking for their customers. Specifically, APIX helped them expand digital banking services, and exposed them to new partner fintechs in the region. With these new partners, UBP set up referral deals and reduced their risk of working with new fintechs. The webinar also highlighted how platforms typically do not use live customer data, resolving some of the potential privacy and data concerns.