UnionBank Debuts New Digital Onboarding Tech

The UnionBank of the Philippines is digitizing its onboarding process to offer custom solutions that will aid in making banking transactions more seamless, the bank announced on Thursday (Oct. 22).

Through The Portal, the bank’s digital banking platform, the new solution will offer a variety of services including bills payments, payroll, fund transfers, check writing services, merchant payment gateway systems, and credit facilities, the bank said.

Ramon Duarte, head of UnionBank Transaction Banking, said he thinks “everybody from individuals to business folks [is] becoming more and more comfortable in using technology today.”

“We can only just look at how we’re now running our lives, professionally and personally in this new work,” he said.

Noting that onboarding is usually one of the more strenuous parts for corporates in utilizing new platforms, with a number of new interfaces and processes needing to be learned, Duarte said The Portal can help clients go digital and begin work in less than a day, the release says.

Miguel Dans, lead product manager of UnionBank Business Banking, said there was likely going to be a strong well of need for such a product.

“I think we’re the first bank to allow this for businesses and there’s a huge demand for this especially from those  and that is in the business sector who still mostly transact checks and that’s one of the exciting features when you’re operating on the platform.”

Dans added that all digital accounts will be enrolled on The Portal by default, and said the bank wanted to move everyone into online banking that wasn’t already doing so.

The government in the Philippines was recently said to be considering limits on the number of digital banks allowed to operate in the country. The process would be set up so that digital banks face the same regulations in the Philippines. The new attention to digital banks as of late comes with the influx of use due to the pandemic.