Tonik, a local digital bank owned by Singapore-based Tonik Financial Pte Ltd., has renewed its banking partnership with financial software provider Finastra to expand its core banking functions and to speed up its online services.
In a statement Thursday, Sept. 28, Tonik, which has one million customers, said it has forged a new deal with Finastra to power its end-to-end core banking capabilities with Finastra Essence.
Finastra Essence is described as advanced technology with a “broad and deep banking functionality” and “digital to the core” because it is cloud-enabled. It can provide both retail and commercial banking capabilities for conventional or traditional banks, and Islamic banks at “a lower cost of ownership and reduced operational risk.”
So far, there has not been a digital bank in the Philippines that can offer Islamic banking services or Islamic finance. There are only six banks granted digital banking license by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and Tonik was the first applicant to be granted one.
As far as Islamic banking is concerned, the BSP has only granted one Islamic banking unit or IBU license to one unnamed conventional bank since the Islamic banking law was enforced in 2019.
Tonik said with the renewed Finastra partnership, this should further improve the deployment of “dedicated consultants” that will “accelerate Tonik’s development and launching of new products and services.”
According to Tonik CEO Greg Krasnov, Finastra Essence has been instrumental in increasing its client base.
He said its open architecture and “sophisticated functionality” have allowed the digital bank the “flexibility to build the right technology stack for our needs – whether that was launching the bank on time and on budget or fueling our rapid growth – as well as the agility to develop revolutionary new products and bring them to market quickly.”
“This has been key to our success, helping us reach one million customers in less than three years, and with new dedicated resources from Finastra we will be able to accelerate our innovation even further,” he added.
Meanwhile, Finastra’s John Guest, the company’s Managing Director for Asia and the Pacific said the company’s innovative thinking and the right technology they apply are factors to its successful partnership with Tonik.
He added that Finastra can “help the bank bring cutting-edge digital banking and financial inclusion to even more people in the Philippines.”
Finastra’s open platform for innovation, FusionFabric.cloud, has been used by financial institutions since 2017 as software solution for lending, payments, treasury and capital markets, retail, commercial and digital banking.
As an open finance solutions provider, it has worked with 45 top global banks.
Open finance is the extension of data sharing principles and allows customers to have control over their own data.
The BSP has an ongoing PH Open Finance Pilot that will develop technical and operational standards for an open finance ecosystem in the country.
Basically, the pilot program is a collaborative project on a voluntary basis to explore the use API technologies in the delivery of financial products and services which will be responsive to the needs of customers.