Investors who took part in the funding round for Tonik include venture capital firm Insignia Ventures Partners and Credence Partners. Regional angel investors also participated in the funding round.

With regard to the fresh funding round, Greg Krasnov, founder and chief executive at TONIK told the media, “We are honored to have secured the backing of such prominent regional investors as Insignia and Credence. Over 70 percent of the adult population in the Philippines remains unbanked, and market research indicates that over 50 percent of existing bank clients would be keen to switch their deposits to a pure-play digital contender. We look forward to working with our new investors to improve financial inclusion in the country.”

Earlier this year, Tonik Financial announced that its subsidiary Tonik Digital Bank received approval from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), to provide digital banking services in the country.

Tonik is expected to go online in the Philippines this year. It claims to be the first fully digital bank in the region and one of the very few globally to be operating on the basis of its own bank licence.

To launch its digital bank in the Philippines, Tonik is partnering with Finastra to use its cloud platform to power its end-to-end core banking capabilities. Global neobanks such as Gravity and Revverbank also use Finastra’s cloud platform.

Traditional banks such as CIMB, ING and MayBank have also launched their own digital banking unit in the Philippines.

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Lito Villanueva, executive vice president, and chief innovation and inclusion officer at RCBC revealed that the digital bank will be called as Diskartech.

With the launch of Diskartech, RCBC will become the first Philippines-based bank to enter the virtual banking space. Currently, there are only two digital banks operating in the country- Malaysia-based financial giant CIMB Bank and Dutch lender ING Bank. Both CIMB and ING Bank launched their services earlier this year.

Lito Villanueva told the media, “It is something that I think will happen by January. In the Philippines, we have not seen any local digital bank yet offering that as a separate proposition. Everything will be on cloud, so we won’t be using the core banking of the bank, but this will be cloud-based banking.”

He also pointed out that RCBC is the first and so far, the only bank in the Philippines to be approved by the authorities to launch its financial inclusion accelerator programme across 42,000 administrative divisions in the country.

Recently, RCBC also launched its mobile application which offers three distinct services to its user. Firstly, the application offers a multi-currency foreign exchange facility supporting more than 10 currencies. Also, it offers its user the service to make timely deposits up to $200,000 and make eGov payments through PESONet and LandBank.

Earlier this year, RCBC received regulatory approval to merge its business with RCBC Savings Bank. The same was approved by RCBC’s board of members last year.

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