By Elise Leise, FinTech Magazine
There’s a conundrum in the Philippines that often halts the flow of progress: ‘We want digital transformation, but we don’t have 100% internet penetration or data access especially in the countryside’, says Lito Villanueva, RCBC Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation & Inclusion Officer.
Pre-pandemic, 71% or 51 million adult Filipinos were unbanked, and only 10% used digital banking, according to the 2019 Financial Inclusion Survey published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the country’s central bank.
‘Many Filipinos already have little or no access to brick-and-mortar banking’, Lito says. ‘It takes so much effort that banking is the least of a low-wage worker’s concerns. They’re worrying about surviving day-to-day, instead of opening a bank account’.
This is partly due to the geography of the Philippines. As an archipelago with more than 7,100 islands, many geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas (GIDAs) are hard to reach.
‘Even being known globally as the most social media-savvy users, most of our islands are still not digitally connected’, says Lito. ‘But while the pandemic highlighted the importance of digital banking, it also underscored that we don’t need to have 100% of the resources at hand before driving transformation. We learned that it is a process, a journey which we can improve as we go along’.
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