Helios, a Philippine-based financial technology or fintech company, seeks to revolutionize green power financing for Filipino households to help reduce the high cost of power in the country while protecting the environment.

Alex Aronson, a former Filipino-American rugby player, and Hsin Yao Cheng co-founded Helios, a climate fintech platform, in February 2023. It sells solar mortgage products.

What Helios does is act as an aggregator for all the processes needed by new housing loan applicants or those with existing home mortgages to be able to include a solar mortgage product in the loan application.

As an aggregator, Helios markets its product to housing loan applicants or to those with existing home mortgage. They also partner with banks for financing purposes. At the same time, they gather some of the most trusted solar panel suppliers, and installers. They package these components as a solar mortgage product.

“We’d like to call ourselves a climate fintech platform. Think of us as a process orchestrator. You have the bank who wants to finance loans, the customer who wants to acquire solar since they’re dealing with high Meralco bills, and the installer. All of these three parties want that transaction to happen. But there’s a lot of coordination that has to happen. Helios coordinates all the processes. We’re the platform in the middle. We aggregate the supplier, installers and the banks,” explained Aronson.

PARTNERSHIPS

Helios has partnered with Ayala-led Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) in October last year and with Security Bank Corp. recently. It seeks similar arrangements with other banks to give their customers more options.

Existing borrowers can avail of their solar product by refinancing their current home mortgages.

“While paying for the house, you can add on for solar and it gets bundled together and financed as one. We help consumers get more protection against utility bills, so it’s a win-win for everyone,” Aronson said.

Helios also makes sure that their clients get the lowest interest rate from their partner banks.

“It's the first of its kind in the Philippines and the first in all of Asia. It's the first solar mortgage product,” he explained. “There are solar financing companies, but nobody in Asia actually integrate the mortgage,” he said.

Helios has also teamed up with some of the world’s known solar panel suppliers. So far, they have accredited about five largest solar panel installers with networks all over the country.

In addition, this solar mortgage product comes with preventive maintenance check by its installers.

With a warranty of 25 years, customers are assured of almost lifetime service.

WIN WIN

“We're helping the banks make business. We're helping the customers,” he said.

Part of their job is to make sure their clients are financially qualified to get approved by its bank partner. And then, they consult with them on the size of their house and their electricity consumption.

Helios boasts of using the same Tesla technology to generate satellite images of roofs and get the accurate measure to determine the exact number of solar panels to be installed.

Installation of the solar panels can be done easily within three days, but processing for taking out a loan takes longer and could run to a month or longer.

For all the processes and intermediation that they undertake to package the entire product for their clients, Helios earns commissions.

“It's a win-win solution for all parties,” said Aronson.

TARGETS

The solar mortgage product is also gaining traction. Aronson noted that the younger borrowers are keen in getting the solar home mortgage product as part of their housing loan.

He said this is a clear sign that the younger generation is now more aware of what green solutions can do to help business while protecting the environment.

From the time they launched in October last year, Aronson said they already submitted to BPI about 100 customers with P300-million potential loan packages.

The target is to do 10,000 homes this year and six to seven million homes in five years. 

“It’s a very big target, and yet we still have to accelerate it. There are like 2,000 homes being built yearly in the Metro alone and that gives us a huge backlog,” said Aronson, who once worked with a credit scoring startup in the country.

The biggest market they could see for their product is the existing home mortgage sector if they convert their homes to solar-powered.

EXPANDING

Aronson sees the expansion of their lean 15-man organization as they ramp up their operations.

“We're growing, we're building out our marketing and sales team so we can service more customers. We’re building out our operations team to ensure smooth loan application and smooth solar power installation,” he said.

Aronson is proud of this Filipino startup. “This is a real bonafide Filipino innovation. And, the idea is most Filipinos would be interested in solar,” he said.