Xavier Marzan, chief executive officer of True Money Philippines, discusses financial technology companies during Tuesday’s regional meet of a rural bank group.
CDN PHOTO/CHRISTIAN MANINGO
Creating more partnerships and going digital is one of the better business formulas to grow for businesses adapting to the use of technology and offering their services without a physical infrastructure.
This is particularly true to financial technology companies or companies that use technology to aid financial services in their payment system for their own businesses or to other businesses that have basic infrastructure problems, said Xavier Marzan, chief executive officer of True Money Philippines, an e-commerce company focusing on providing financial services to its clients.
“In e-commerce, it’s easy to put up a website but you have to solve problems such as: how will people pay if they want to pay in cash without having a physical store? How will you actually give out the product and how can one pick up the product in payments?” said Marzan in an interview at the Regional Conference of The Rural Banks Association at the Cebu Grand Hotel on Tuesday.
“In financial services, ganun rin. Yes, you can offer bills payments, but can you offer bills payment everywhere? That’s part of the problem we are solving since with these basic infrastructure problems they cannot do it alone,” he said.
He cited his company’s thrust as a financial technology firm to target unbanked and underserved Cebuanos and help rural banks provide remittances, loans and insurance services to their account holders when the banks initially could not.
He also said that FinTech companies could also expand their businesses through partnerships in the rural and urban markets.
He said they could partner with small businesses such as convenient stores, sari-sari stores and minimarts to reach the rural market, while they could also partner with bakeries and gasoline stations to reach the urban market.
He said that while there are many opportunities for e-commerce and digital businesses in Cebu due to the rise of infrastructure, there is also a need for such businesses to be physically present, and these could be done through partnerships.
On the other hand, Marzan also emphasized the importance of teams dedicated to observe and control transactions to avoid anti-money laundering risk and fraud.
The Rural Banks Association held its regional conference last January 30 at the Cebu Grand Hotel where True Money Philippines, a FinTech company, pitched its services to expand its network and partnerships.