Session Title: CEO Keynote Address
On the 20th of October 2022, twimbit in partnership with F5 and Kyndryl organized the inaugural “Bank of Tomorrow Asia Pacific Summit”. We were thrilled to have TG Limcaoco, the President and CEO of BPI, to chat with Manoj Menon, twimbit to discuss his aspirations and vision for the future.
Speakers:
- Manoj Menon, Managing Director & Co-Founder, twimbit
- Jose Teodoro K. Limcaoco , President and CEO, Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI)
Tenets to BPI’s success
- Capitalising on new opportunities while preserving consistency
BPI’s ability to continuously balance innovation and preserve customer trust has ensured customers that they can always expect a consistent level of excellence. Currently, BPI is focusing heavily on mass markets and SMEs, shifting its gears from the high end of the economic pyramid.
- Increasing financial literacy and awareness in underdeveloped regions
The state of the Philippines presents an abundant opportunity for BPI to invest in financial education for 70 percent of the underbanked or unbanked population.
“We aim to make credit and payments simpler for them.” – said TG Limcaoco, the President and CEO of BPI.
BPI expects to launch more serviceable products at affordable prices to achieve this, aiming to double its customer base of 9 million to multiples of that within the next five years.
- Manage environmental risk
Investor demand, the realisation that BPI is the custodian of the customer’s assets, and the innate respect BPI bears for the environment is what has led to the push for environmental awareness and sustainability. Taking a bold approach, BPI has made an explicit statement against financing new coal projects, committed to halving coal exposure by 2026, with hopes to eliminate it by 2032.
BPI also emphasises that its employees are attuned to ESG and sustainability, encouraging its employees to volunteer in internal programs developed to advance the community forward. “Close to half of our employees have been involved in some form of our volunteer projects.” – said TG Limcaoco, the President and CEO of BPI.
Role of technology in BPI
In the right hands, technology is a fantastic enabler in guiding businesses and institutions on what works for a business model. BPI understands this with extreme precision that there is no one size fits all solution under the guise of technology, as its utility is circumstantial depending on the country.
- Reducing unit costs with technology
For example, in the Philippines, the absence of a large credit bureau and a national ID system to track individual consumers are the fintechs’ major obstacles.
For BPI, this is their greatest advantage since the biggest differentiator between BPI and other fintechs or neobanks is its profitable existing core business and access to large capital. With it, BPI can easily maximise technology to its fullest potential and fund new initiatives.
“With technology, we can charge the same product to the customer, but derive the revenues from another partner, for example, a retailer or a partner to who the depositor is paying, making payments easier overall.” – said TG Limcaoco, the President and CEO of BPI.
Technology enables BPI to produce a large volume of services through retail while drawing its revenues from corporates that can better aggregate their funds. The result is a new and improved business model in favour of everyone.
- Maximising technology and its utility with partnerships
BPI is well aware of its stature; however, it is also aware of its large presence in a relatively small financial market. Although the Philippines may be large in population, financially, it is quite small because of its economy size.
Hence, a helping hand goes a long way for BPI in upscaling its services. Partnerships are essential to BPI in its pursuit of maximising technology for success. With time-to-market and execution speeds becoming the top priority, partnerships provide the best solution for BPI to scale its services easily and deliver with extraordinary speeds. An added benefit is partnerships also provide an opportunity for BPI to learn the best practices of up-and-coming digital institutions.
In the long run, partnerships will help BPI leverage technology quicker than its competition since it is easier to rely on external partners to develop it rather than to develop it in-house. In addition, partnerships to fully leverage technology will also ensure BPI’s platform is scalable and reliable, driving the business forward.
Future for BPI
In the next five years, the CEO of BPI aims to project an entirely different PPI, with BPI emerging as a very evolved bank across all segments of the Philippines economy.
It aims to achieve this through two key aspects: improving its ecosystems with partnerships and making a big push for ‘customer obsession.
Regarding improving its ecosystems, BPI has made its first big step, recently announcing its merger with Robinsons Bank. “With the merger, we can bring together two groups, the Gokongwei group and the Ayala group. So we are very excited about that.” – said TG Limcaoco, the President and CEO of BPI.
The push for ‘customer obsession’ by the CEO has greatly encouraged to rethink its level of service from processes, policies and procedures to be more customer-friendly. BPI has made excellent progress on that front, ensuring each project is centred around the concept of treating it as a customer journey. The end goal is to ensure that customer satisfaction is sky-high.