PAYMENT GATEWAY Xendit Philippines is participating in the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) Philippine Open Finance Pilot as both a provider and user of application programming interface (API) technology.
“In this capacity, Xendit is lending its startup prowess in building financial infrastructure that will facilitate the free flow of data between and among its existing partners and other stakeholders to achieve the full promise of an open finance ecosystem,” the company said in a statement on Monday.
“Financial institutions can also leverage this infrastructure to address issues such as process efficiency, long approval periods, online availability, and overall accessibility,” it added.
Open finance allows customer consent-driven data sharing among institutions that follow the same security standards. This is expected to lead to the creation of more finance solutions for both customers and financial institutions.
The PH Open Finance Pilot was launched in June and is a collaborative initiative among volunteer financial institutions to explore the use of API technologies to enhance their financial products and services.
This is the next phase in the implementation of the Revised Open Finance Roadmap (2023-2027), which lays out the priority actions of the BSP for the adoption of open finance in the country.
Xendit Philippines is providing its expertise on API design to the BSP for the project, it said.
“It has been providing insights with practical use-cases that stem from its broad understanding of local customers,” it said. “On the back-end side, it prioritizes legibility to empower stakeholders to understand use-cases right away and be able to build services that provide more value for their own customers. This will also ensure that interoperability, one of the hallmarks of the open finance ecosystem, is efficiently achieved.”
“Notwithstanding other external variables such as access to stable internet, Xendit believes that the Philippines is getting there when it comes to readiness for an open finance ecosystem. The robust regulatory support from the central bank and its partners is a positive nudge that steers the country towards its financial inclusion vision,” it added.
Prior to participating in the pilot, Xendit said it was also part of the central bank’s Open Finance Oversight Committee Transition Group.
“Xendit is committed to advancing the BSP’s Open Finance roadmap because it will provide access to financial services to the underserved, and will build the foundations for the next frontier of financial innovations,” Xendit Philippines Head of Compliance and Government Relations Guadalupe Lyn P. Vergel de Dios said. “We believe strongly that fintech players should prioritize data security and infrastructure resilience in future-proofing the design of Open Finance initiatives so that the Philippines can set a new standard of excellence in data exchange.”
“Moving forward, our goal is to first establish this capability and indeed prove that the ecosystem works, without sacrificing the integrity of our financial system. And then it is an iterative process, which means that we will keep finding the next pain point to address and tweak from there,” Xendit Philippines Head of Product Innovation Jon Trinidad added. — L.M.J.C. Jocson