Innovation finds a new home

HIGH TECH These barriers in the lobby grant access using facial recognition technology — Photos by Doris Dumlao-Abadilla

Your face is your ID when you enter this smart building. A visitor registers at a self check-in machine and goes through the electronic barrier that opens using facial recognition.

This is the brand-new glass-laden UnionBank Innovation Campus at the Sand Hub technology park in San Pedro City, Laguna. The 8,000-square meter facility is the first of the three buildings in a complex master planned by UnionBank using Apple’s Mothership campus in Cupertino, California, as its inspiration. It is the first of its kind in Philippine banking.

As the Aboitiz group aspires to be a “techglomerate”—one that ditches the traditional corporate framework in favor of an agile startup culture, its banking arm, Union Bank of the Philippines, plays a vital role.

There was a time when people likened UnionBank to a hedge fund, its fortunes then tied to its treasury team, which consistently performed well. But to build more durable earnings, the bank has repositioned itself as an enabler of “invisible” banking. It now thinks of itself as a technology firm with a banking license, whose mission is to embed banking in everyday transactions.

This innovation campus is an embodiment of such mission: a hotbed of research and development. It houses under one roof, UnionBank’s teams working on artificial intelligence (AI), data science, blockchain and other futuristic stuff. There is also a cybersecurity center that serves as redundancy backup for UnionBank’s head office in Ortigas Center. But because this campus uses the latest technology, the bank expects to revolutionize a lot of its processes, particularly risk management.

People often ask UnionBank president Edwin Bautista: why build an innovation campus at this time when hybrid office/work-from-home mode is in fashion and a lot of meetings can be done via Zoom? This is what he tells naysayers, “Work has to be visible especially in innovation. If you want to communicate to the organization that we’re moving fast on innovative products, they should know what’s going on in the whole bank.”

The problem with Zoom, he says, is that only those in the meeting room would know what’s happening; there’s no visibility to the rest of the organization. In this campus, visitors can see the bank’s sprint teams brainstorming in their bean bags.

And by working in a smart building, Bautista says employees get a “feel of the future” and are motivated to work hard.

“I’ve always been a strong believer of touch and feel,” says Bautista. Customers, partners and guests also get to “experience and see what agile is all about,” he adds.

The meeting rooms are armed with flat-screen monitors that use touchscreen technology. So instead of just playing PowerPoint presentations, the presenter can write on them like an electronic blackboard and annotate in real time.

The programmers of UBX, UnionBank’s fintech arm, work in this campus. It is also the home of UnionBank Digital, which aims to empower the country’s digital economy and bring trust and governance into the space.

Apart from being the first local bank to embrace blockchain, UnionBank is also setting up shop in the metaverse or the 3D iteration of the internet. Imagine conducting your transactions using an Oculus headset in a metaverse bank branch. This campus is designed to be a breeding ground for a lot of high-tech solutions.

MASTER PLAN The design of UnionBank Innovation Campus was inspired by Apple’s circular “Mothership” in Cupertino.

Patent wall

Of course, it won’t be an innovation campus without a patent wall, literally a wall where tech companies display their patent registrations as a visible representation of their innovation culture.

In the case of UnionBank, its patent wall currently features 16 registrations issued by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines to the bank from May 2020 onwards, including those related to blockchain, AI and data analytics. UnionBank Mobile App, The Portal, The Ark, akin, XLOG, Project i2i, PHX Stablecoin, Financial Supply Chain and GC Blockchain are among the bank products that already use these technologies.

The bank also has more than 40 patent applications still pending, and the number is still growing.

“Did you notice that the other wall is blank?” Bautista says with a big laugh, suggesting there’s a lot of room for the bank to put more patent registrations.

“This wall highlights the people behind our products and services, their ideas and the continuous innovation of UnionBank. We credit the people behind these and their brilliant ideas that created significant impact and breakthroughs that allowed the transformation we are proud of today,” says Joey Rufo, chief information security officer of UnionBank. “To us, this wall is a reminder that we never stop, regardless of how far we think we have already reached.”