Increased utilisation of financial technology is setting the stage for further digitisation of the Philippine’s consumer banking industry, which is slowly transitioning into a “cash-lite” economy.

Despite weak growth in the banking industry last year, UOB managed to grow its SME deposits significantly and reported the lowest CIR among its peers. It was also the first bank to announce $2.2 billion in relief assistance in February 2020, ahead of any government support measures. It was the leading provider in government’s assistance schemes to SMEs with the largest market share.

The global outage led by the CrowdStrike-Microsoft faulty software update underscores the emerging gaps in resilience, interdependence of systems, vendor concentration, and single points of failure in networks