Union Bank of the Philippines, seventh-largest by assets, has made it easy for small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs (SMEs) to migrate their brick-and-mortar businesses into the digital sphere and take advantage of a very lucrative market, where sales in 2012 alone aggregated P79 billion.
This surfaced at Union Bank’s Eureka Forum at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel in Makati City on Wednesday, when executives said some 1.9 million SMEs already own a web site, but whose potential has yet to be exploited in full.
According to Genaro Lapez, executive vice president at Union Bank, while quite a number of SMEs would like to move from the physical and into the digital sphere, the transition terrifies and immobilizes them often.
“People get overwhelmed when they’re out there” on the Internet, “and this is what we address,” Lopez said at the forum.
According to him, Union Bank has partnered with a number of established entities, including merchants, the payments and settlement industry and, of course, the logistics end to deliver a whole range of services, enabling SMEs to tap the digital sphere with as little apprehension as possible.
“The moment an SME gets digital, we have the backend infrastructure to capture” the process and make them painless, he said of the service the universal lender and its consortium partners have created.
Lopez also noted that from a global perspective, there are more mobile phones, numbering more or less 60 billion, than there are Filipinos, and that this constitutes a huge upside for digital entrepreneurs looking to tap the e-commerce market that grows in high
double digits.
So-called micro, small and medium enterprises account for 99 percent of all registered businesses in the country, and contribute the equivalent of 36 percent of local output or the GDP, based on data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
Union Bank executives said transiting from brick-and-mortar and into the digital marketplace should not be a problem for those who patronize the lender’s e-commerce services.
Called the Eureka Forum, Union Bank and its partners vowed to help entrepreneurs recalibrate their business strategies for optimum impact in the highly competitive market of digital selling.
The lender and its partners have brought the forum to entrepreneurs not just in Metro Manila, but also in other urban centers, such as Cebu, Davao and Iloilo City.
Image credits: Nonoy Lacza