Aboitiz fintech expands its customer base

Singapore – The business verticals of UBX, the fintech venture studio of Aboitiz Group, have experienced exponential growth over the past three years, a ranking official said on Wednesday.

UBX managing director of open finance Jaime Garchitorena said the company’s corporate customers grew 184 times since 2019 to 230,000 business to business customers, representing almost a fifth of the total number of businesses in the Philippines.

With this size of clients, UBX’s gross transaction volume has reached $1 billion, a 383 percent increase since its commercial launch three years ago.

“Today, UBX has over 200 financial institutions and thousands of agents in our ecosystems. We have built award-winning and globally recognized agnostic, open and interoperable platforms that serve as the future backbone of open finance in the Philippines,” said Garchitorena.

BUX, the payment platform, meanwhile, saw its transaction volume reach 50 million over the past three years, registering a 440-fold growth with 100,000 merchants, 60,000 access points and 30 payment channels.

Lending platform SeekCap, meanwhile, has registered over 48,000 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and has processed $300 million worth of corporate loans or 14 times its size since its launch in 2019.

SeekCap is the country’s first digital lending marketplace created specifically for MSMEs who need access to credit to run and scale their businesses.

Finally, the banking platform, called i2i, has seen transactions balloon by 5.4 times over the past three years, connecting customers to hundreds of financial institutions found in communities, such as rural banks and remittance centers with over 10,000 touchpoints, across the country .

“Over the last three years, we went from trying to engage individuals to engaging individuals in their entire communities. And we’ve seen powerful results not only from a business perspective, but also from a social perspective,” Garchitorena said.

He added that through open finance, UBX is able to bridge the gap between the unbanked, underbanked and banked.

“The depth of coverage allows the inclusion of the widest range of customers using financial services. Through our technology, we have already included these customers and then provided a digital identity and a transaction history that can be easily consolidated into a digital wallet making them a part of the digital ecosystem for open finance.”