The Union Bank of the Philippines held the fifth installment of its E-TalkTales series last Wednesday, 20 October 2020. No less than the bank’s Head of Transaction Banking Mon Duarte discussed various transaction banking solutions highlighting The Portal — its all-digital banking platform for corporate clients.
Duarte started the conversation by defining UnionBank’s Transaction Banking suite as simply offering customized solutions to help digitize its corporate clients. Traditional transaction banking helps manage the flow of funds by facilitating collections and payments, over-the-counter check deposits, to the provision of armored car services for high cash transaction situations, among others.
UnionBank’s The Portal offers a host of solutions that include bills payments, payroll, fund transfers, check writing services, merchant payment gateway systems, and credit facilities. It provides corporations with all their essential banking needs in a single platform.
The Portal was designed in such a way that allows it to provide utmost flexibility to clients, making it the preferred platform for those who don’t want the one-size-fits-all approach of most competitors when it comes to the corporate banking solutions they offer.
Part of the flexibility offered by The Portal comes by way of various customization options available to clients. Depending on the current needs of their organization, clients can choose only the solutions that they want to avail of at the moment, and then adjust later on. To make it easier, the Bank created a number of packaged solutions based on what it thinks would make sense for clients, which they can avail of any time via The Portal website.
Another key attribute of The Portal in terms of flexibility is the possible configurations for transaction approvals. With this feature, corporates will be able to establish a specific maker-checker process for each transaction made by their team members. This will give them free control over who can make which transaction, as well as the maximum amount for each transaction depending on who makes it, among others.
With The Portal, UnionBank aims to make transaction banking as seamless for users as possible, and the Bank wants to make this very clear right from the moment a client starts using the platform — the onboarding process.
Onboarding is typically one of the most stressful phases of using a new platform for many corporates since it involves learning a new set of interfaces and processes. This phase can take a few days or weeks or even a few months to finish. With The Portal, however, UnionBank also digitized the onboarding processes so that clients can get into the platform in less than a day, usually within a few minutes, with no further training needed.
These are only a few innovative features of The Portal. As UnionBank continues its digital transformation journey, more services will become available in the coming months.
As The Portal was created from the ground up, UnionBank was guided by the principle of having a simple integrated platform in order to ensure the best user experience for customers. For the bank, providing superior transaction banking experiences to users is a top priority, and The Portal is the perfect representation of what it believes transaction banking should be.