Fintech firm targets top Philippine banks to deploy AI credit tech
By Derco Rosal
Trusting Social AI Philippines Inc. is targeting partnerships with the country’s 10 largest banks, part of a broader push to deepen its footprint in the local financial market with artificial intelligence-driven (AI) risk and identity solutions.
The Singapore-based financial technology firm has so far onboarded more than 50 institutions supervised by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including six universal and commercial lenders.
“Six of the top 10 banks in the Philippines are existing clients and are already using our credit scoring system,” Trusting Social Philippines Chief Revenue Officer Alok Chaubrey said during a media roundtable.
Founded in 2013, the fintech company operates in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It provides credit intelligence, digital identity verification, and fraud prevention services to financial institutions across Asia. While the firm already maintains a large local presence, it is aiming for full penetration among the country's top-tier lenders despite extended procurement timelines.
“That’s my wish list, but it’s taking some time because the sales cycle with the banks is pretty long,” Chaubrey said. “It has to go through several iterations, with different stakeholders involved—from risk and product to information security, legal, and compliance.”
Chaubrey said that Trusting Social also counts approximately 15 non-bank financial institutions, three digital banks, and several online lending platforms and cash-lending companies among its local clients.
Beyond credit scoring, the firm’s local strategy focuses on broadening access to financial services. Johnny Escaler, Chief Executive Officer of Trusting Social Philippines, said that by leveraging alternative data and deploying AI to lower operational overhead, lenders can deliver tailored financial products to an estimated 25 million Filipinos who still rely on basic feature phones.
“Since we’re able to reduce the cost to serve with better information on borrowers, you can actually have a private banker in your pocket,” Escaler said. The approach is designed to help underserved segments, such as farmers and plantation workers, gain access to formal credit markets.
The company's expansion push coincides with a looming June 30, 2026, regulatory deadline mandated by the BSP under the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act. The law requires all supervised banks to deploy automated fraud management systems.
Trusting Social is marketing its biometric infrastructure as a more secure, cost-effective alternative to one-time passwords, or OTPs, which are increasingly vulnerable to intercept scams and phishing attacks.
“What we’re really preaching is that the market adopts facial authentication because that’s what we saw in Vietnam,” Escaler said. “That was basically the safest way to roll out an authentication solution.”
To prevent data breaches, the company utilizes a process called vectorization, which converts facial data into mathematical hashes instead of storing raw images. Trusting Social said the technology enables rapid authentication, protects consumer privacy, and detects sophisticated digital threats.
“Something that a human cannot detect, machines can detect,” Chaubrey said. “That is where our unique selling proposition lies, and that is how we can solve problems such as deepfakes, synthetic IDs, face swapping, and 3D attacks.”
Escaler said that while OTPs remain a weak link in digital security, banks looking for higher safeguards can layer biometric identity verification on top of existing device-checking protocols rather than replacing them entirely.
To expand its market reach beyond private contracts, Trusting Social is also exploring partnerships with government-owned and controlled corporations, including Land Bank of the Philippines and the Development Bank of the Philippines.