Cantilan Bank VP Shares How Blockchain Increase the Rural Bank’s Efficiency

Cantilan Bank discusses how the blockchain effectively helps the bank in its mission for financial inclusion in far-flung areas of the Philippines.

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Cantilan Bank is one of the rural banks in Mindanao that pilots Union Bank’s i2i Project. The bank has been serving the unbanked and pushing for financial inclusion since 1980.

During the Blockchain Applications and Economics Forum 2018, Ms. Tanya Hotchkiss, Executive Vice President of Cantilan Bank, Inc. (CBI) presented and talked about blockchain and its impact on financial transactions and services. She shared that 86% of the Filipinos don’t have a bank account and 41% of those are in Mindanao.

Even with an alarming number of the unbanked, 47% of Filipinos lend, 4 out of 10 save money, and 86% believe that having access to financial services is important. She made a clear point about the necessity of financial inclusivity even in far-flung areas.

Through Union Bank and ConsenSys’s Project i2i, rural banks such as Cantilan Bank can now make bank-to-bank transfers in just five minutes and with one to two employees. This is certainly a boost from almost a month of waiting, 26 processes, five departments with five employees. By tapping into the blockchain, rural banks are now able to course through Union Bank which lets them perform important banking functions that universal banks can do.

Currently, CBI has 43 branches in Mindanao and Visayas. In 2017, the bank partnered with Oradian with the help from Asian Development Bank for Instafin, a cloud-based banking platform.

Union Bank’s chief technology and operations officer, Mr. Henry Aguda, shares that the bank aims to connect at least 100 rural banks in the blockchain this 2018.

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