FROM preferential lending to “Green” projects to using technology to offer banking services to the poor and reducing its own carbon dioxide footprint, Ayala-led Bank of the Philippine Islands has mapped out a program to conduct banking in economically, environmentally and socially sustainable ways.
These initiatives are in line with the “triple-bottomline” business model—one that is conscious of profit, people and the planet—now being implemented across the Ayala group.
“Sustainability is not only about green initiatives although those are the most popular. It’s more about making sure that people have jobs and we provide banking services to all,” BPI president Aurelio Montinola III told reporters during the launch of the bank’s first sustainability report on Friday.
Part of the environmental initiatives is a new partnership with International Finance Corp., which is part of the World Bank group, to finance energy-efficient projects.
“What we do is we send a technical person to come to our clients to check what could be upgraded and improved and then after that, we give financing to them. There’s a risk sharing with IFC,” Montinola said.
He said BPI recently signed an agreement with IFC to undertake a second tranche of this risk-sharing agreement. About P1.2 billion worth of loans under this scheme had been disbursed under the first phase.
BPI is willing to lend as much as P5 billion for these initiatives. In case of big projects, Montinola said IFC could assume half the risk involved.
Meanwhile, Montinola noted that part of the sustainability framework was to expand market share by tapping the unserved market, which constituted about 70 percent of the Philippine population. “In 1985, we went into consumer (banking). In the 1990s, we went into SMEs (small and medium enterprises), and now we go to microfinance,” he said.
Microfinance is the provision of loans and other banking services to the entrepreneurial poor. Through newest banking unit “BPI Globe Banko, A Savings Bank,” which is a mobile bank, BPI hopes to reach out to even the people who live on $2-a-day, an internationally comparative poverty line used by multilateral institutions.
BPI is hoping to generate a critical mass of clients, about 500,000, for the new mobile microfinance banking unit, which will be powered by affiliate Globe Telecom’s electronic G-cash system.
The expansion of electonic banking services to all customers across different banking segments, Montinola added, was making banking easier 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“You don’t have to use transportation to go to the branch. Technology is a big means of saving your time, saving energy, saving C02 [carbon dioxide] emission,” he said.
And even for BPI’s physical banking offices, Montinola said the goal was to reduce energy consumption.
