EVENTS: ABF TRANSACTION BANKING ROUNDTABLE
Pandemic pushes for a hybrid set-up of transaction banking services The future will still involve a lot of paper, but apps pave the way for more digital interaction.
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ransaction banking services across Southeast Asia are pulled into a tough balancing act of ramping up their digitalisation of services whilst also remaining accommodative to their customers’ preferences for physical banking services and the other unique quirks of their local markets. Bankers from the Philippines and Malaysia shared how they’ve kept up with serving the individual needs of their clients amidst the time of rapid digital adoption during the Asian Banking & Finance Transaction Banking roundtable held virtually for a global audience on 27 May 2021. Both John-C Syquia of the Bank of the Philippine Islands and Andre Lee of FinServ Solutions agreed that transforming local banks’ services to accommodate more digital services that address corporate clients’ individual needs is no easy feat. BPI’s Syquia recognized that whilst the pandemic has ramped up banks’ adoption and roll-out of digitalbased services in the past year, in the Philippines, there will still be a lot of paper used in the near-future for transaction and corporate banking. 40 ASIAN BANKING AND FINANCE | Q3 2021
You can’t do away without checks on rent, because many of our clients still want to use check payments.
“For instance, in the Philippines, you can’t do away without checks on rent, because [whilst] we interconnect all the banks, many of our clients still want to use check payments,” Syquia told the online forum. The good news is that in the Philippines, clients--even small and medium enterprises (SMEs)--have easily adapted to using digital tools thanks to Filipinos being adept at using mobile phones. “The good thing about the Philippines though is, as you know, we were the texting capital of the world. So as far as using the mobile phone is concerned, it was easy to get the retail and SMEs to adapt to that, because a
Bank of the Philippine Islands (Source: Walter Sy)
lot of transactions were being done by the telecommunications companies through that, and they were [already] financial transactions,” Syquia said, adding that BPI’s transaction banking team has capitalized on this to connect with the SMEs, their suppliers, and bigger companies to meet their banking needs. Whilst Syquia discussed digitisation from a bank’s standpoint, FinServ’s Solution’s Lee meanwhile explored the clients’ perspective regarding this shift. Lee laid out three issues that clients consider: one, how the client will move from the previous manual face-to-face interaction with their relationship managers (RMs); two, whether middle market companies and individuals are ready to move to the digital way of banking; and third, the need to fully digitize the back office functions of the financial institution. “As far as the clients are concerned, they have their hands full, because they have these three things to consider, and that’s not something that they are extremely familiar with. So that’s where folks like us especially bring value, they actually go to banks to ask for their guidance,” Lee said. Lee also noted how the digitisation of banks in Malaysia differed from that of the Philippines, notably thanks to Malaysia’s central bank pushing for banks to digitise a long time ago. As financial institutions and companies complied with the regulations, more people also began to
