Bankero Fabian Dee of Metropolitan Bank & Trust (Metrobank) has been re-elected as president of lead electronic banking consortium BancNet, while bankero Nestor Tan of BDO Unibank Inc. was given a fresh mandate as chairman of the Board of Directors.
“in a superior position as we prepare for the gradual exit from the pandemic and consequent recovery of the economy, increased consumption and higher demand for services,” Dee said.
BancNet shareholders elected the company’s directors including bankeros Dennis Bancod of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., Land Bank of the Philippines president Cecilia Borromeo, John Cary Ong of Security Bank, Noel Santiago of Bank of the Philippine Islands, and China Bank president William Whang.
New directors elected to the 15-man board were Henry Rhoel Aguda of Union Bank, Kathleen Charmaine Hernandez of Standard Chartered Bank, Equicom Savings Bank president Eduardo Katigbak Jr., Wilfredo Rodriguez Jr. of Asia United Bank, Sterling Bank of Asia president Cecilio Paul San Pedro, Robinsons Bank president and CEO Elfren Antonio Sarte, Gerardo Susmerano of East West Bank, and Philippine National Bank president Wick Veloso.
One of the new technologies that BancNet is harnessing is the cutting edge Vocalink system to which BancNet fully migrated instaPay last year. InstaPay enables the instant digital transfer of funds between accounts in different banks and electronic wallets.
With the full migration, BancNet was able to introduce two new use cases of real time fund transfer: payment to a merchant or store and payment to a billing company or biller, both interoperable using the national QR code standard. This world-class infrastructure also gives BancNet the capability to process real time transactions other than payments and remittances to adapt to changing consumer needs and behavior.
Dee also revealed that BancNet is collaborating closely with Philippine Payments Management Inc. (PPMI), the instaPay Automated Clearing House (ACH), and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to enable cross-border payments between Philippines and Singapore and Malaysia.
“In particular, we have embraced the use of technology in both our internal business operations as well as our development and delivery of services to our members and participants,” the bankero added.
BancNet is also set to implement Trace and Alert, a fraud analytics tool, to warn participants against potential money laundering attempts.
BancNet ended the year with 123 members and affiliates whose nationwide network of 22,721 ATMs and 413,896 POS terminals served a card base of 93.86 million.
