Category: Press

UnionBank of the Philippines’ UBX, the leading Open Finance platform in the Philippines, is powering the mobile app of Aboitiz Power Corporation (AboitizPower), one of the country’s largest retail electricity companies, integrating digital payments to provide customers of the latters’ distribution utilities greater convenience. 

Under the agreement, AboitizPower will integrate BUx, an all-in-one payment solution platform developed by UBX, into its mobile application, MobileAP. The app is available for subscribers of AP distribution utilities such as Visayan Electric Company, Davao Light and Power Company, Cotabato Light and Power Company, and the Subic and Lima EnerZones.

Through this integration,  customers will be able to pay their electricity bills online, providing greater convenience by removing the long process of heading to service centers to settle their monthly dues. Moreover, MobileAP empowers customers to remotely check their electricity bill for the past 12 months without going to outposts to check their status or waiting for the physical copy via mail. 

“UBX and AP share a steadfast commitment to promoting inclusion by providing wider access to services – be it finance or power. Our partnership, which leverages UBX’s open finance technology, brings this goal forward and provides customers the value of greater convenience,” UBX Managing Director for Open Finance Jaime Garchitorena said.

As the country’s leading all-in-one payment solutions, BUx unifies everything about payment collection channels into one platform: from card payments, online banking or bank transfers, and over-the-counter payments to e-wallets. With BUx, businesses can track all their transactions through real-time updates and notifications of credited funds through its best-in-class merchant dashboard. 

“The future of our economy lies in digital payments. No less, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) made it a mission to have 70 percent of Filipino adults involved in the financial system by transforming 50 percent of the total volume of retail payments into digital. By collaborating with different industry players, we are helping the government achieve that goal,” Garchitorena added.

For download for both Apple and iOS devices, users can assess their power consumption and its monetary value through a chart tailored to their profile. They can download a PDF copy of their records with AP and manage multiple accounts in a single app. 

MobileAP also features additional functions such as multiple DU registration, notifications and advisories, payment and consumption monitoring,  payment center and service center look-up, and more to come, such as outage reporting.

“Thanks to UBX, we can bolster MobileAP by making it a one-stop app where our subscribers can do everything from getting updates about our services to checking their billing information to bill payment. Aside from improving their convenience, we honor our customers’ trust by providing them with transparency that only BUx, as a payments solution, can provide,” said Arnold Villanueva, AP Distribution Utilities Assistant Vice President, and Bills-to-Cash Head

AP is one of the largest electricity providers in the country with a balanced mix portfolio of power generation, distribution, and retail electricity services. The company’s mission is to provide reliable energy at reasonable prices while pursuing sustainable solutions to help reduce the adverse effects on the environment.

True transformation means elevating lives and fulfilling dreams, and not just breaking ground in the technological aspect, according to the chairman of UBX, the leading open finance platform in the Philippines. 

In the latest episode of the Orange Chair, a web series featuring today’s thought leaders and influencers, Henry Rhoel Aguda, who also sits as the Chairman of UBX as well as President and CEO of UnionDigital Bank,  debunked the misconception that digital transformation in finance is all about tech.

Cost and investment figures, as well as programming, are only second to the customer service aspect, Aguda said 

“If you get the people, you have the fighting chance of implementing your digital transformation. If you don’t get the ‘People Agenda’ right, no amount of technology or change process will result in something significant from a digital transformation standpoint,” Aguda emphasized.

Having led UnionBank’s digital transformation journey in 2016, making it the leading digitally-enabled bank in the Philippines, Aguda said digital transformation need not be as expensive as many would think. 

However, despite the reduced expectation on cost, the road is paved with difficulties given that the field of banking and finance is ever evolving.

“The question should be: what do we want to become as an organization? What would be the value creation we want for our cubstomers?” Aguda said, sharing lessons from his experience in building UBX.

Despite its status as the fastest growing fintech company in Asia, UBX started out small with only a few people congregating in one room with a shared dream of introducing changes in the financial industry through emerging technology. With only some guardrails on funding the initiative and initially a sandbox for experimenting with fintech, it has now dealt with more than P100 billion in transactions. 

Beyond UBX, Aguda was also recently appointed as the Digital Infrastructure Lead of Malacanang’s Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC). An achiever in his own right, Aguda’s diverse career is backed by a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of the Philippines. He graduated from law school in 2008 with Latin Honors and emerged as the class valedictorian.

He dabbled in acting and is also currently an educator, taking after his mother, who was an elementary school principal. True to his dedication to helping people achieve their dreams and his commitment to learning, Aguda wishes to spend the latter part of his career in his alma mater. According to him, he wishes to be a significant leader in UP one day.

“One of the tools that I use to keep me relevant in technology is to be abreast with the academe and the younger generation of technology leaders. I learn from my students first, and it gives me humility knowing that this is the new generation of technology leaders. They will learn more than I did. I am just the custodian of the people who will take over what I’m doing now.” Aguda said.

The Orange Chair series is available on the official YouTube channel of UBX Philippines.