UnionDigital may end 2022 with P 4.8-B loan book

UnionDigital Bank, the digital banking arm of Union Bank of the Philippines, expects to end this year with the largest loan book among its peers in the highly competitive new banking category.

UnionBank president Edwin Bautista said UnionDigital would likely end 2022 with a loan portfolio of P4.8 billion and a customer base of 1.7 million. The digital banking startup was launched only four months ago.

The only platform among the six Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)-licensed digital banks that is owned by an existing bank, UnionDigital deviates from most of its peers’ strategy of offering hefty interest rates to attract deposits from retail customers. Instead, it is focused on building up its earning assets.

“The name of the game is lending because that’s where we make the money,” Bautista said in an interview with Inquirer on the sidelines of Singapore FinTech Festival 2022.

UnionDigital’s customer base is also bulked up by the migration of EON accounts, the old digital platform which had been offered by UnionBank for decades before the BSP created a new banking category for digital-only banks.

EON has built about 2 million account holders, but not all of them could be migrated into UnionDigital, Bautista said.

UnionDigital recently announced that it had acquired 1.73 million customers and reached more than P4 billion in loan book in its first four months of operation even when its app is currently available by invitation only and has gone live only for a limited set of customers.

It has also collected close to P3 billion worth of deposits. •INQ