BSP greenlights Aboitiz-led Union Bank of the Philippines’ digital bank

Union Bank of the Philippines (UBP) on Wednesday said the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has approved its application to establish a digital bank.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE), UBP informed that the BSP approved on July 15 its application to form a fully virtual bank to be called UnionDigital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Aboitiz-led universal bank.

With this, UBP's UnionDigital becomes the fourth bank in the Philippines granted a digital banking license, next to Overseas Filipino Bank (OF Bank) of the Land Bank of the Philippines, neobank Tonik, and Singapore-based UnoBank.

Several other companies are expected to join the growing industry, including the Gokongwei Group, Lucio-Tan-led Philippine National Bank (PNB), Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC), and Voyager Innovations who is the company behind PayMaya.

The BSP issued a circular recognizing “digital banks” as a new bank category separate from existing bank categories last December 2020 and set the minimum capital requirement for digital banks at P1 billion.

The agency also put a cap on the number of initial digital banking players to five to observe the operations of these entities first.

Sources:

UBP's PSE Disclosure (Material Information/Transactions)
BSP sets limit on pioneer digital banking players