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| GCash Chief Strategy Officer Rowena Zamora and Banco Santander North America Regional Head Christiana Riley during a World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 panel (Image Source: MegaBites/GCash) |
Driving progress in fintech must be grounded in the responsible use of transformative tech like artificial intelligence (AI) according to a panel at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2025 recently held in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. In keeping with this year’s theme “Collaboration For The Intelligent Age”, professional services network Deloitte hosted a panel to look at real-life applications of AI in financial institutions and explore how these can be scaled to improve productivity and customer experience, as well as enhance multisectoral approaches to financial inclusion and cybersecurity. GCash Chief Strategy Officer Rowena Zamora joined Deloitte Services Industry Leader Neal Baumann and Banco Santander North America Regional Head Christiana Riley at a WEF panel entitled “Unlocking The Potential Of AI In Financial Services”.
For the Philippines’ leading finance super app and largest cashless ecosystem, GCash's goal is to utilize technology to break long-standing barriers to financial inclusion. Zamora shared, “We are driven by a vision that is very simple but very difficult to achieve, which is ‘Finance for All’. The Philippines is underpenetrated in terms of financial services. It is a country that faces [many] systemic challenges to inclusion, particularly financial inclusion, so GCash has focused on [using] technology, AI, and other similar enablers to bridge that gap.” The panel then focused on value creation, looking into operational efficiency, customer engagement, and optimizing risk management by harnessing AI. During the segment, Zamora delivered insights on the lack of identity, credit history, and other documentation necessary for citizens to gain access to basic services, saying, “In an economy like the Philippines, where the majority of the population is unable to provide what traditional financial institutions need for them to open an account, the challenge is [providing] financial services to the largely unbanked or underbanked population.”
In its pursuit of tech-driven alternatives to traditional solutions, GCash enlisted the help of AI. One such solution was to leverage the Philippines’ high mobile penetration and internet usage rates to address the inclusion challenge. Zamora cited, “[Users] might not have the traditional requirements, but they have a digital footprint. They make digital transactions, which we can use as a proxy for what traditional financial institutions typically require.” This is where GScore, the groundbreaking credit scoring model of GCash, was introduced. GScore uses transactional behavior on the app as a substitute for measuring a person’s creditworthiness. Zamora added, “This has enabled us to unlock over two billion US dollars for micro-loans to seven million Filipinos in the past several years. That’s quite huge in a country where credit penetration has been in the low digits. Before the pandemic, only one percent of Filipinos had access to credit.” Today, GCash is used by 94 million people who now have access to loans, investments, insurance, and more at their fingertips.
Looking ahead, the WEF panelists stressed the need to remain strongly focused on the future, both in terms of insights and solutions, to strengthen resilience within the industry. “How we use and the quality of the data that we use [are the other] key considerations. Your models will only churn insights based on the kind of data you have, so be very clear about what challenge you’re trying to solve and how technology and AI can help not just address it but leapfrog to scale the solution,” said Zamora. Abiding by this, GCash endeavors to continue refining its AI-powered models and improve the reach of its offerings by collaborating with the private and public sectors, ensuring no one is left behind in the digital financial revolution.
