The Man Behind UnionDigital Bank: Arvie de Vera

The origins of an innovation-first digital bank

It takes a group of people to make lasting change. Even then, without focus and direction, without a shared understanding and a clear mission, groups fail more frequently than they succeed.

Effective leadership is often what makes the difference. Good leaders provide the clarity of purpose which is critical to success. When the machine moves as one, it is more effective than the sum of its parts.

UnionDigital operates as one and its purpose is crystal clear: to empower people through banking. That focus did not come overnight, but was built through a lifetime of experience.

Co-founder and CEO Arvie de Vera has devoted his professional life to refining and achieving UnionDigital’s purpose. His vision, tested by experience, is where the organization draws its clarity.?

The roots trace as far back as Arvie’s career, which began after he graduated from Ateneo de Manila University in 1997 with a degree in Philosophy. It’s an unlikely start for a banker, but not unusual for Arvie. In fact, most of his experiences defy the norms of banking, and that has allowed him to see the industry through a different lens from the very beginning.

Arvie has always believed that work should serve a greater purpose- that it should help others. No matter the role, whether janitor, teller, or executive, a person’s profession is a chance to make someone else’s life easier, even in the smallest way.

That belief did not align with his early experiences in banking.

When he joined the industry, Arvie quickly realized that innovation is not in a banker’s nature. Most of his job involved following tradition and keeping the great banking machine working- but the machine itself was already broken. It ran on red tape and bureaucracy, not on a desire to help its customers. Its internal processes were a maze of spaghetti systems that had become redundant over decades of merges, acquisitions, and regime changes. And no one suffered more than the customer, who waited days for checks to clear, spent hours on phones with customer service, or had to pay additional fees for something as basic as receiving a funds transfer. Rather than addressing these inefficiencies and improving experiences, banks were content to continue making money off of customers as middle men.

There had to be a better way to do things. With so many resources at their disposal, banks had the power to make real improvements to customers’ lives, but it simply was not their focus. At the time, the last great innovation in banking- the ATM- was already 30 years old. Traditional bankers had little interest in innovation.

Arvie left banking early in his career in search of an industry that was more open to change. He took jobs in broadcast media and telecoms. While neither quite satisfied his search, he learned about the disruptive nature of technology in these industries and began to wonder how the innovation-first mindset could be applied to banking.

It wasn’t until 2010 that Arvie re-entered the banking industry and had a chance to test his hypothesis. He was approached by now CEO of UnionBank, Edwin Bautista, in whom Arvie found a kindred spirit. They shared a common disappointment towards the current state of banking and both yearned to build a bank that was driven to bring real value to its community. This time, UnionBank not only had the resources and talent to do it, they also had the missing piece: leadership that believed in improving lives.

Arvie recognized the opportunity and took a position at UnionBank as Business Development Director. His role was to create new products that used emerging technology to produce better services.

Edwin and Arvie became close partners over the next decade as they- in collaboration with yet another visionary, Justo A. Ortiz, Chairman of UnionBank- strove to bring innovation into the industry.

Arvie wasted no time at his position. He created brand new products like U-Share, a donations collection platform that enabled charities and NGOs to collect funds from all over the world. U-Share was a fusion of banking and new financial technology that helped fund people in need. With this project, Arvie was finally able to use innovative banking to make a positive impact, and on a national scale. For its creative problem solving, U-Share went on to become a finalist at the 2013 BAI Finacle Awards.

He then created the Mobile Money Cash Management system, a collaborative project that enabled over 300,000 microfinance clients in remote areas access into the financial system. In doing so, he enabled small business owners more opportunities to grow their businesses. For creating that solution, Arvie received awards from the Connect World Forum in Dubai (2012), the Banking and Payments Asia Trailblazer Awards for Strategy Excellence in Financial Inclusion in Singapore (2013), and the Celent Model Bank Award for Payments Innovation in New York (2015). Now, the Mobile Money system has over $150 million in circulation.

Those early successes gave Arvie momentum and proved that his aspiration to provide real value through banking products was possible. In 2013, he became UnionBank’s Head of Corporate Product Management where he spearheaded an award-winning Corporate Cash Management Product team. He and his team earned several accolades including the 2013 Asian Banking & Finance Awards for Domestic Cash Management, Bank of the Year, Global Banking and Finance Review Best Cash Management, and 2014 International Banker for Best Innovation in Retail Banking.

In the early-mid 2010’s Fintechs emerged on the scene and began to disrupt the landscape. While other traditional banks were busy competing against the newcomers, afraid fintechs would replace banks, Arvie saw a chance to partner with them. He had been fighting for over a decade for banks to adopt innovation and tech culture, and he knew better than most bankers that innovative technology was not the enemy, but the way forward.

In 2016, Arvie established the Fintech Business Group (FBG) at UnionBank, whose mandate was to collaborate, enable, and synergize with fintechs. Through the FBG, UnionBank did what no other bank thought to: they supported numerous young fintech startups, many of which led to some of UnionBank’s best products.

The FBG partnerships brought about a renaissance of new products based on innovations in Blockchain, Fintech, and Open Finance - all of which would later become the foundations for UnionDigital. At the time, blockchain had only been around for 8 years and was a long way from being adopted by financial institutions. Arvie, who had been an early adopter of Bitcoin, had been pushing the bank to explore blockchain as early as 2014. At last, with the FBG, he broke through.

One of the first groundbreaking blockchain products to come out of FBG was i2i, a blockchain network that connects rural banks and non-bank financial institutions throughout the Philippines. i2i makes it possible to make instant payments and transfers to Filipinos living in rural areas where there are no large banks. Before i2i, the process took as long as three weeks.?

To power i2i, UnionBank created its own ERC-20 stablecoin, PHX, which is approved by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and pegged to the Philippine Peso. As a central bank approved digital peso, PHX is the first of its kind. It has also been used to create instant, low-fee cross border remittances from Singapore to the Philippines, fundamentally changing the way OFWs send money home to their families.

Arvie was part of the team that also led to the spin-off of UBx, UnionBank’s wholly-owned proprietary Fintech that is gaining major traction in Southeast Asia. UBx carries on the fintech investment and partnership model of FBG, and is itself a fintech company that serves as a launchpad for other promising fintech start ups, helping to bring more game changing innovations into banking.

Arvie continued to make big leaps in Open Finance by creating the API Developer Portal, an open marketplace for APIs that allows developers to easily locate and access the APIs of Filipino banks, businesses, fintechs, and partners. This makes cross-platform integration easier than ever, enabling groups to cut the red tape and collaborate to bring better services to the country.

All of these initiatives draw from that same focus that brought him into UnionBank over a decade prior. That was to make banking what it was meant to be: a service to improve lives. The goal was always for his work to make a positive impact. Bringing technological innovation into banking finally made that dream possible.?

But all of that is only the beginning. These technologies are still young, and their implementation in banking is even younger. There is so much room for growth. In order to see that growth through, the bank itself needs to evolve.?

A traditional bank, and one as established as UnionBank, is a large machine with a long history. It has many different focuses. In order to push innovation as far as it can go, to reimagine banking not only as a faster version of today, but as an entirely new and improved service, requires a redesign from the ground up. It requires a fully native, digital bank with a singular focus on innovation that can go where traditional banks will not. And the key behind this vision is the visionary himself.

All of this has culminated in the founding of UnionDigital Bank, a fully digital bank that aims to bring the best of new financial technologies to its customers, while maintaining the trust, regulation and security that people have come to expect from a financial institution. It is the capstone of Arvie’s decades-long mission.

As of July 2021, UnionDigital became one of the very few digital banks in the Philippines to be granted a digital banking license from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).?

In UnionDigital Bank, Arvie has rallied a global group of talented and experienced professionals, each of them visionaries in their own right, who share his focus in pushing banking technology to new heights. This machine has the greatest capacity of any bank to fulfill the mission at scale.

UnionDigital is not one man’s work, it is a machine composed of purpose-driven people who believe, like Arvie, that their work should benefit others. That team draws upon their shared vision to accomplish together what no one can do alone, and to make banking the empowering platform that it was always meant to be.

For more information, feel free to connect: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/arvie-de-vera-81100b23/