UREKA, together with its Consortium Partners, held a Special Forum last February 27, 2018 at the Philippine Trade Training Centre (PTTC) 31^st Anniversary Week.

The UREKA Forum aims to help MSMEs grow locally and even internationally, through the power of the e-Commerce space. The UREKA Forum is UnionBank’s way of affirming its commitment to empower Filipino business owners to succeed. As a platform for economic empowerment, the UREKA Forum puts together a community of experts and organizations that rally behind every Filipino’s capability to multiply growth ten-fold through entrepreneurship that knows no boundaries. 

Various businesses were invited to talk about their products and solutions that will help MSMEs in growing their business. Dragonpay, Taxumo, UnionBank’s EON and UnionBank GlobalLinker were just some of the speakers during the event.

Dragonpay is a company that enables other businesses to accept e-Payments from customers. They have an e-Commerce service and an online transaction facility that allows customers to pay online even without owning a credit card. 

The Marketing Manager for EON Bank talked about the EON Prepaid Card. EON is the first bank in Asia to use facial recognition in digital banking, or more commonly known as, “Selfie Banking.” As a promo to the attendees, they gave away free Visa Prepaid Cards to all the attendees.

Eugene Arboleda, CEO of Taxumo, discussed their online platform for filing taxes. Filling out documents and paying for your taxes has now been made easy. All the client needs to do is to enter his or her income and expenses, generate an automatically filled-out document and pay for their taxes. 

Dino Velasco from UnionBank, shared an overview of UnionBank GlobalLinker, UnionBank’s platform for MSMEs. UnionBank GlobalLinker is a platform that enables business owners to network with various Start-ups and MSMEs, learn about different industries and latest trends, create a free e-Commerce store, and a lot more. In addition, signing up is free. Since the platform is still new in the market, more merchants would still be brought on board to create exclusive offers for UnionBank GlobalLinker users.

The UREKA Special Forum would not have been possible without the support of the following partners: Air21, AMTI, Dragonpay, Esquire Financing, Facebook, Microsoft, PanahonTV, PLDT SME Nation, Shopinas, Taxumo, Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), UnionBank GlobalLinker, EON, and UnionBank.