RCBC to set up digital rural banking unit

The board of Yuchengco-led Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) has approved the creation of a wholly owned rural bank that will engage in digital banking, the bank told the Philippine Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

The new digital banking platform will be launched by February and will be run by

Lito Villanueva, RCBC executive vice president and chief inno­vation and inclusion officer, RCBC president Eugene Acevedo said.

This is part of RCBC’s digital banking road map that aims to reach the grassroots and bring in about a million new customers this year. It is part of the bank’s financial inclusion accelerator platform, DiskarTech.

The launch of a virtual bank is seen to allow RCBC to reach out to a bigger retail market base and serve low-income segments. These could comprise accounts with an average daily balance of P800 to P1,000.

RCBC’s role model is BBVA, a Spanish multinational banking group that Villanueva considers “one of the more progressive digital banks in the world,” one that has built successful operations in multiple markets.

Meanwhile, RCBC has registered 564-percent year-on-year growth in transaction count in its ATM Go digital agency banking deployment, to 1.2 million last year from 186,000 in 2018. Throughput also increased by 521 percent to P3.3 billion.RCBC ATM Go, touted as the country’s first neighborhood ATM, enables any Bancnet ATM cardholder to withdraw cash through rural banks, sari-sari stores, drugstores, cooperatives and microfinance institutions nationwide. INQ