Typically, most financial inclusion initiatives focus on developing propositions aimed at underbanked end users (“B2C approach”). It is less common for a financial institution to focus on enabling third parties to develop or provide such propositions (“B2B2C approach”). Yet, this is exactly the approach that the Union Bank of the Philippines took for financial inclusion, as demonstrated with two of their initiatives, API Marketplace and Send-i2i.
This is Part II of the case study of UnionBank’s award-winning projects, and profiles the bank’s Send-i2i initiative. The API Marketplace initiative is described in Part I, Union Bank of the Philippines: Reaching the Underserved through Open APIs.
The bank’s i2i (“island-to-island, institution-to-institution, and individual-to-individual”) network connects rural banks through a blockchain-based platform. Send-i2i extends the network to enable sending cross-border remittances all the way to rural banks well placed to reach underserved communities.
