Insider spotlight:
Ana Aboitiz Delgado, UnionBank president and CEO, said the bank’s investment in AI has led to a tenfold increase in the number of credit cards it approves, particularly following the acquisition of Citibank’s retail banking portfolio in the Philippines.
“Our AI is really embedded across the customer journey,” Delgado said. “There are use cases for AI, and I would say that there’s probably three big areas where it has shown a lot of progress for us, and they all have resulted in higher ability to approve loans.”
The three areas Delgado cited include customer onboarding through enhanced Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, AI-powered credit underwriting, and fraud detection.
“We embed AI in our KYC process, so that allows us to process a lot more applications than before, because before people would have to be KYC’d on a manual basis, so that caused a lot of backlog,” she explained. “Now that’s powered by AI, so a lot more applications are processed in near-realtime to realtime.”
Beyond faster onboarding, AI has also improved UnionBank’s ability to assess credit risk and prevent fraud
“We also use it in our credit approval or underwriting portion of the process,” Delgado said. “And third, we also use it in fraud prevention.”
She added: “This has really helped us to reduce the number of potentially fraudulent applications coming through, but also if there are attempts to do fraud on our platforms, AI is helping us to eliminate and deter any fraud from happening.”
Looking ahead, Delgado said the next focus area is personalization. “The next space for us is really, how do we use this to customize and personalize customer experience journeys? And that should be coming in over the next few months,” she said.
UnionBank’s AI-powered approach is a key part of its broader strategy to enhance operational efficiency, boost customer satisfaction, and maintain its leadership position in digital banking innovation.
