BayaniPay supports remittance servicing from US 

A financial technology firm targets to increase its share in servicing remittances of Filipinos in the United States to as much as 20 percent within three years, following a tie-up with Sy-led BDO Unibank and after getting additional seed capital, according to a report by Philippine News Agency.

“Our goal is to go up 20 percent of the market long term. We think it’s going to be three years from now. It could be quicker and it could be a little bit less depending on how successful we are at customer acquisition,” BayaniPay chief executive officer (CEO) Winston Damarillo said in a briefing.

The California-based neobank, which partnered with Southern California-headquartered East West Bank, was launched in March 2022 and targets to provide digital financial services initially to the around 4.2 million Filipinos in the US.

It recently raised additional USD4.5 million in seed funding from East West Bank, Wavemaker Partners and Talina Ventures Labs.

It also partnered with BDO to allow users of its mobile app to directly pay services in the Philippines through paycode technologies.

Damarillo said the use of paycodes will allow their users to easily do cross-border payments of bills, school-related fees, medical expenses and real estate-related expenses.

The digital-only bank currently offers, through BDO, zero fees and allow its users to open digital bank accounts with Visa debit card in the US through East West Bank.

BDO senior vice president and business development head for remittance Ferdinand Bacungan said remittances are expected to grow further given the continued reopening of the economies.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) eyes a 4 percent growth for inflows from Filipinos overseas this year.

“We’re doing much better than the 4 percent growth (target) of the BSP,” Bacungan said.

He said they have not seen the impact of the acceleration in inflation rate to the volume of remittance inflows to the Philippine but noted some overseas Filipino workers normally increase the frequency of sending money to their beneficiaries.

“That (impact of higher inflation) makes more workers send more than once a month,” he added.