DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/4 July) – The country’s oldest bank has introduced to Mindanao the Philippines’s first online banking that links mobile phones to its bank system, allowing transactions to happen at the flick of mobile phones even when corporate finance point persons and owners are on the road or outside the country.
“You only need to have your mobile and internet connections and you can approve and consummate bank transactions, like payroll and regular payments, from your mobile device,” Ma. Corazon S. Remo, senior vice president and head of BPI Centralized Operations Group, told a briefing with partner clients and members of the press at the Marco Polo Hotel here recently.
The BPI assured the BPI Expresslink Mobile, the newest Internet banking through mobile devices like cellular phones, was secure and efficient, and had so far already attracted 600 existing corporate and value clients of the bank within four months since it was launched in October last year in Manila.
A bank statement said that the Expresslink Mobile “allow clients to collect from customers, subscribers or distributors through an automatic debit arrangement.”
“Viewing and downloading of collection reports can also be done online to help them reconcile and accurately post payments,” it added.
“Our account and liquidity management products allow customers to monitor their deposit account balances, warehouse postdated checks and transfer funds to and from enrolled deposit accounts online, real-time,” it said.
“They can also view non-deposit transactions such as commercial loans, and trade and money market transactions. And they need not wait for bank statements to be delivered since they can download their bank statements with just a few clicks of a button,” it said.
The technology, designed only by BPI and its refined software with security features developed by an Australian computer company, would also allow BPI clients “to pay their employees, utility providers and suppliers without leaving the comfort of their offices”.
The BPI has also partnered with the government’s Bureau of Internal Revenue, Social Security System, Pag-IBIG, Bureau of Customs and PhilHealth for electronic payments of regulatory dues.
The software is an application “that can be accessed through your Android phones, Blackberry, Nokia and iPhones.”
Corporate clients presented by BPI during its Davao City launch said they were elated “that there is already this thing that helps us ease our office transactions.”
Jocelyn de Vera, president of plastics manufacturing firm Davao Toplas, and Marjorie May U. Teh, operations manager of the business outsourcing Focusinc Group, said the new technology “has been wonderful, allowing us to approve payroll and releasing them on time while we are out travelling.”
Nieves Basa, vice president and head of the BPI transaction banking division, said that the 600 corporate clients that had enrolled immediately after they knew of the technology was “only five percent of the corporate and other business clientele of BPI.”
“The main reason why still a lot of our clients have to access this technology is that they still don’t know that we have this technology,” she said.
BPI spent close to P20 million to design the software and to get the service of the Australian company to embed the industry-accepted security features.
Only BPI has offered this technology in the country, although this has been practiced in North America, Europe and other developed economies, Remo claimed. “Our clients can enroll with us to access this technology at no cost to them. We will prioritize our existing clients,” she added. (MindaNews)
