RCBC Becomes the Latest Addition to the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network

The ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) has announced the inclusion of Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) among the four new members of the API Exchange during the Singapore FinTech Festival 2020.

AFIN was established as a non-profit organisation in 2018 by the ASEAN Bankers Association (ABA), International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). AMTD Foundation and Mastercard are AFIN’s corporate founding members.

In July, local trade association Fintech Alliance.ph had joined AFIN as a member.

“This is another step towards further promoting open banking regime in the Philippines by way of strategic collaboration with regional and global players. It perfectly aligns with the objective of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas on creating an open finance framework to support the country’s massive digitalisation push,”

Eugene S. Acevedo, RCBC president and CEO said.

APIX, the flagship product of AFIN, is a global cloud-based platform that enables financial institutions and fintechs to discover one another on a curated global marketplace, design experiments collaboratively in the sandbox and deploy innovative solutions quickly at a lower cost.

Once registered with the APIN platform, RCBC may already access various services from the APIX Community Platform, a network to share ideas, solutions and market opportunities.

It also includes the APIX Global Fintech Marketplace where a member can ideate on business problems and search for pre-built solutions.

In addition to that, the APIX Sandbox enables financial institutions to publish and distribute or find and subscribe to API services, experiment, test, collaborate around the development of new services, using development tools, integration services, synthetic data and standard banking API simulators.

“From growth to hyper growth. This is everyone’s aspiration. And RCBC is poised to go that route, to experience rapid, exponential progress in this digital realm. But this can be achieved with a well-defined digital roadmap, a digital-centric organization, and of course a strategic collaboration,”

Lito Villanueva, RCBC Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer said.

Financial institutions and fintechs around the world are eligible to apply for the APIX platform. Fintechs can publish their APIs and consume other users’ APIs. Financial institutions that will be considered are those service providers licensed in a given jurisdiction by a relevant authority to provide financial services to consumers or business users.

In their role as a financial institution, prospective users are eligible to apply if they are using the APIX Platform for service developments in any of the 22 global jurisdictions that includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Thailand, Tonga, Vanuatu, Vietnam.

The other new members include TymeBank from South Africa, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).

Featured image: (Top left to right) Manesh Diwaan, Managing Director of AFIN, Vishal Kanvaty, Senior Vice President – Products and Innovation at National Payments Corporation Of India and Lito Villanueva, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer of RCBC. (Bottom left to right) Coenraad Jonker, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Tyme, Rachel Freeman, Executive Director at Tyme and Jaspreet Singh, Global Lead Financial Health and Innovations at UNCDF.