Embedded banking can help micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) thrive amid the pandemic by making various processes more convenient and streamlined for them, allowing them to focus on the more important aspects of their business.
This was one of the main points discussed by UBX President and CEO John Januszczak at the recently concluded CEO Virtual Summit, wherein he also talked about the many ways UBX is making it easier for these enterprising Filipinos to find new opportunities to do business even during a pandemic.
In his presentation, Januszczak talked about how UBX is paving the way for embedded banking in the country especially during the pandemic, focusing on solutions geared toward SMEs such as SeekCap, UBX’s proprietary platform that connects borrowers with trusted lenders.
For SMEs in particular, SeekCap has made it easier for them to secure loans right as needed by allowing the platform to be embedded into other platforms, including e-commerce sites where these SMEs might be selling their products on. To date, UBX has processed over P3 billion worth of loans on the platform.
“By embedding into the experiences and activities that matter, in this case for MSMEs doing e-commerce, the lending experience is made invisible,” Januszczak said.
In addition to SeekCap, UBX also has Sentro, an online shop builder that allows SMEs to easily create their very own e-commerce site in minutes, which has helped more than 30,000 merchants to date. There is also the recently launched Sentro Build, which enables the creation of virtual versions of malls, expos, trade shows and other physical marketplaces–both platforms providing entry points for MSMEs to embed their e-commerce activities.
Another solution that is helping UBX normalize embedded experiences in the country is Bux, a platform that gives MSMEs access to a wide range of payment gateways, which then allows them to provide different options to match the preference of customers, whether they want to pay using credit cards, e-wallets, or cash, among others. There are now over 100,000 SMEs on the platform as of writing.
“Bux integrates into platforms used by SMEs for selling online. It can be as simple as Facebook and Viber, or it can be as comprehensive as e-commerce solutions and platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and others.”
Magnifying the capabilities of all these platforms to promote embedded banking in the country is UBX’s i2i network, a decentralized, real-time payment system that connects financial institutions and service providers to each other in a way that is secure and cost-effective.
“In the scope of building invisible banking, we are also leading the open finance revolution. When you take platforms like i2i, like Bux for embedded payments, like SeekCap for embedded lending, and other platforms that we’re building, like our embeddable insurance platform Assured, or our self-sovereign identity solution Akin, when you put all of these together, and put them behind an API, we have created the ability for other digital platforms, for fintech and for merchants to allow consumers to move, manage, and make more of their money,” Januszczak said.
“Just as UnionBank looked into the future and speculated on a future of invisible banking and spun out UBX, at UBX we continue to look into the future, and we speculate on what a post-platform future may look like, and we believe that the future is both decentralized and disintermediated,” he concluded.
