BIZ BUZZ: Euromoney hails BDO ‘best bank’ in PH

It’s not just earnings season this month for banks and conglomerates: it’s also awards season.

The latest Euromoney Awards for Excellence recently named Sy family-led BDO Unibank Inc. the “best bank” in the country.

BDO, also aptly the Philippines’ largest bank, was cited for its “exceptional” financial performance last year, during which it delivered P73.4 billion in earnings, the highest ever in Philippine corporate history.

The banking arm of the SM Group likewise clinched the “best bank for ESG” award, after having financed P898 billion worth of sustainability projects in 2023 alone, according to Euromoney.

Meanwhile, HSBC was awarded “best international bank,” owing to its 21-percent growth in newly onboarded corporate customers.

Euromoney likewise recognized the British bank’s Smartserve program that reduced the number of days to open an account, and Omni Collect, which “simplifies” payment collection of businesses.

Yuchengco-led Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.’s digital expansion efforts paid off: it was recognized as the “best digital bank” and “best bank for SMES” (small and medium-sized enterprises), specifically because of its digital solutions.

Last year, RCBC launched its RCBC Pulz digital banking app, which added over 1 million users within three months.

Other banks recognized were UBS (best investment bank), Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co. (best bank for corporate responsibility), Citi (best bank for diversity and inclusion), Security Bank (best bank for corporates) and UNO Digital Bank (rising star). —MEG J. ADONIS

Digital-first approach paying off

Enterprises that have adopted a “digital first”—or more aggressively, “purely digital” —platform continue to rise, even if the initial boost from opportunities that opened during the pandemic appears to be transitioning into growing pains.

In the banking sector, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is preparing to open the doors to digital-only banks after three years of temporarily closing the counter in order to observe the initial six groups that were granted licenses.

Profitability may still be a long way for most digital banks and they may be burdened with high ratios of nonperforming loans—more than 20 percent, according to the BSP—but the business case is so compelling.

So much so that even before the BSP started the licensing process in 2020, one player braved untested waters and established a digital bank in the country.

CIMB Bank Philippines, while licensed as a commercial bank, decided to go “digital-only” and launched in 2018.

CEO Vijay Manoharan says the parent firm, the Malaysia-based CIMB Group, decided to pilot this digital-only initiative here because “the Philippines needed it most.”

By this, Manoharan meant that the Filipinos were straggling behind neighbors in terms of access to financial services (such as simply having a bank account) and, more importantly, access to credit.

Almost six years later and CIMB Bank PH has racked up a customer count of more than 8 million. These include 6.5 million deposit customers and 3.5 million borrowers.

The experiment has been declared a success, to the point that CIMB Group is replicating it in the region.

“We are exporting this [digital-only banking] to other markets in Southeast Asia,” Manoharan says. CIMB Group is also present in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. —Ronnel W. Domingo INQ