UCPB and its subsidiary UCPB Savings Bank have joined a program initiated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and its partners, the Department of Education (DepEd) and Bank Marketing Association of the Philippines (BMAP), to raise awareness on the importance of savings and financial literacy among the youth.
The banks signed a memorandum of agreement with the BSP on March 7, 2016, along with 15 other universal, commercial and savings banks, as the financial institutions renewed their commitment to support its Banking On Your Future (BOYF) program. BOYF aims to spread financial awareness to schoolchildren. The new agreement expands the coverage of kiddie and teen accounts to 19 years old from 12 years old, according to the BSP.
“UCPB is excited to participate in the BOYF, which ultimately benefits not only our young depositors but also our banking community and the economy. As you all know, we relaunched our junior savings account recently, which we call Start2Save. We want to make it more engaging for children to save in UCPB at an early age through Start2Save,” UCPB President and CEO Higinio O. Macadaeg Jr. said.
Children who open a UCPB Start2Save account will receive a welcome kit containing a passbook and automated teller machine (ATM) card, which is already equipped with the Euro Pay MasterCard Visa (EMV) chip, the global standard in ATM security. The welcome kit has a notepad, stickers and a birthday coupon, which can be used by the accountholder to claim a gift from their UCPB maintaining branch within the accountholder’s birth month. Under the BOYF, children up to 19 years old may open a savings account with any of its partner-banks for as low as P100. The account does not have a maintaining balance. When the accountholder turns 20 years old, the account reverts to a regular deposit account.
BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. lauded the participating banks who signed up for the expanded BOYF. “We established BOYF to form financially responsible Filipinos starting with children by teaching them the importance of saving and providing them access to child-friendly deposit accounts and other bank products. We’re very happy to say that we now have over 1 million depositors since we launched the program in 2012, thanks to the efforts of our partner-banks and the DepEd. We look forward to higher numbers under this expanded kiddie and teen account program,” Tetangco said in his remarks.
For her part, Education Secretary Leonor M. Briones called on the banks to make saving more attractive to the youth to counter the pull of consumerism. “The challenge facing us today is to raise a new generation of financially educated young citizens who will wisely choose in the battle between spending versus saving and preparing for one’s future,” she said. The DepEd and the BSP developed teaching aids on savings, money management and basic entrepreneurship for the children’s financial education.