Philippines Digital Bank Partners Finastra

The region’s first licensed digital-only bank is expected to debut later this year, providing a full range of retail banking services, focused primarily on retail deposits and consumer loans.

The Philippines’ all-new digital bank Tonik is partnering financial technology company Finastra and will use its cloud platform to power its end-to-end core banking capabilities, a press release announced this week.

Finastra’s Fusion Essence Cloud is already used by European neobanks revverbank and Gravity. It will be deployed from the Microsoft Azure Southeast Asia data center in Singapore, which will allow for both low latency and data residency, the announcement said.

Using digital technologies and a lower-cost operating model, Tonik will be able to offer customers the products and services they need, delivered in a convenient way, as well as increasing opportunities for financial inclusion in Asia, Anand Subbaraman, Finastra’s retail banking general manager, said about the partnership.

Earlier in January, Tonik announced that it would be rolling out digital-only banking services in the Philippines, a market where 70 percent of adults are unbanked, in 2020.

The banking sector in the Philippines is ripe for digital disruption. The country has high internet usage, the majority of Filipinos are unbanked and research shows half of the people who do have bank accounts would be interested in switching to a neobank, Tonik CEO and founder Greg Krasnov said.