Case Study: UnionBank of the Philippines achieves rural financial inclusion and instant, low-cost remittances with ConsenSys Solutions' Project i2i

Driving Financial Inclusion in the Philippines

UnionBank of the Philippines faced the challenge of including millions of unbanked Filipinos and connecting some 476 rural banks that were disconnected from electronic banking and domestic payment networks. To address this, UnionBank partnered with ConsenSys to build Project i2i — an Enterprise Ethereum payment network leveraging Kaleido Blockchain-as-a-Service and Microsoft Azure key management to create a secure, low‑cost inter‑rural bank remittance platform.

ConsenSys implemented a permissioned Enterprise Ethereum solution (web API front end with tokenized‑cash smart contracts on a Quorum/Kaleido backend), piloted with seven rural banks and cleared by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The platform removed at least 20 intermediary steps, boosted single‑account throughput from 25 to 250 transactions/min, and by 2019 had 130 rural banks registered with a target to onboard the remaining 346—enabling near‑real‑time, lower‑cost remittances and access for millions of previously unbanked Filipinos.

UnionBank

Justo Aboitiz Ortiz

Chairman