Unlike other country exhibitors, UnionBank had an entire pavilion to itself. It featured nine of its newly developed products and services, including UnionBank GlobalLinker, a digital platform that makes doing business easier for small business owners; Project i2i, which aims to connect rural banks to the country’s electronic banking network; and XLOG, an online platform that will help businesses link up with global shipping and logistics providers. 

And thanks to a brightly lit circular digital billboard above, the bank had no problem drawing the crowd’s attention. It maximized the digital screen to the hilt, changing the display from UnionBank’s signage to timely messages, such as welcoming Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited the India pavilion next door.

Startup mode

Even more remarkable are some of the people manning the exhibit itself. On hand to personally entertain visitors, answer their questions and explain the featured products and services are no less than UnionBank Chairman Justo Ortiz and President Edwin Bautista. Both stayed for the three-day duration of the event, and didn’t just pop in at the start for the photo op like what many busy company CEOs are won't to do. True to startup form, Ortiz, slugging a backpack, was just wearing a jacket over a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words “TechUP,” the bank’s branding for its financial technology products.

“We’re both here and left the bank in the Philippines in the care of other managers because this is more important,” explained Bautista when Entrepreneur Philippines caught up with him at the SFF. “This is the future.”

Indeed, the UnionBank CEO believes his and the chairman’s willingness to man exhibits in globally important events such as the SFF is a unique strength of the bank. “Where else can you see the bank chairman and CEO manning booths? At the end of the day, that’s our competitive advantage,” he added. “Other banks can follow and copy our products but will you see their top executives manning booths at events like these?”

It’s a practice that the bank emulated from some of the world’s leading startup founders. “What inspired us is two or three years ago, we attended a fintech event and people manning the exhibits were the founders of the startups themselves,” Baustista recalled. “That's how we met Joe Lubin, the co-founder of Etherium. He was manning the booth! It tells you whether they are serious about it or not.”

But UnionBank executives picked up from startup founders more than the informal dress code and readiness to man exhibition booths.

“From the beginning, we were emulating the speed of fintech startups and combining that with the reliability of a bank,” said Bautista. “We found out their secret is agile methodology and scrum teams,” which refers to the way a tech company assembles a group of programmers to deliver a requested software or application to a customer in increments.
 

Bautista, a mechanical engineer by training but who worked mainly in marketing and product development in Procter & Gamble and Citibank, said scrum teams reminded him of project management teams of old except the current versions worked a lot faster. “Back in the day, it took you six months to launch something new,” he said. “Now, you rolled out a minimum viable product and you iterate every two weeks. It’s perfect for banking because the products are digital.”

Digital shift

Relying on several scrum teams, UnionBank was able to roll out several digital banking products and services, including EON, an upgraded and fully digital banking platform that introduced “selfie- banking,” a first in Southeast Asia, allowing clients to log into their accounts by posing in front of their smartphones instead of typing their passwords; Rafa, a next-generation banking chatbot that can answer detailed client-specific questions and not just pre-set queries; and the ARK, the country’s first fully digital bank branch that does away with queuing and waiting. In addition, the previously mentioned products and services displayed at the UnionBank’s pavilion at the SFF were also developed by these scrum teams.

Apart from agile approach used by its teams, Bautista credits the bank’s strategic decision more than two years ago to go “all-in” and embark on an end-to-end retooling of systems towards full digital transformation for the rapid development and deployment of its digital innovations.

As the first bank to put up a website and introduce online banking, UnionBank is no stranger to digital technology. But digital transformation is different, said Bautista.

“We’ve always approached it per product before; now, there’s a commitment to change the entire back-end towards digital to the core,” he explained. “The problem with per product approach is that you can only innovate so much. Eventually, you’ll face a dead-end because of the limited capability of your back-end systems, for example, if you try to do straight-through processing,” referring to transactions that flow seamlessly from a client’s device to the bank to the clearing house to a different bank and then back to the phone all in a matter of seconds.

Unlike its bigger counterparts, UnionBank is not burdened by legacy mainframe-based information systems, facilitating its digital shift. “We were one of the early banks who chose to go open system. Others are still reliant on mainframe computers,” he explained. “They can still introduce digital products by layering transactions on top of mainframe but that means doing it through batch processing whereas the new open systems can do it real-time.”