Trusting Social Philippines, a company that provides AI-powered credit risk and identity solutions, offers its services to the lending industry to better serve underbanked consumers.
The company’s solution was designed for 3 billion underbanked and underserved consumers across emerging Asia-Pacific economies.
Established in the United States in 2013, Trusting Social built a strong presence in Vietnam, Singapore, India and Indonesia. It entered the Philippines in 2019 to address financial exclusion by focusing on enhancing access to formal credit.
Recognizing that more Filipinos have mobile phones than financial accounts, Trusting Social’s AI-driven credit scoring system analyzes anonymized telco data. The technology provides an alternative to traditional credit scoring, allowing lenders to reach millions of creditworthy borrowers who are often overlooked by conventional banks.
“The traditional banking system was inherently blind to hundreds of millions of deserving individuals lacking financial history—that’s the fundamental flaw Trusting Social was built to fix,” said Nguyen Nguyen, founder and CEO of Trusting Social.
“Through data science and technology, we empower financial institutions to bridge that financial access divide,” said Nguyen.
Trusting Social’s insights facilitate universal access to financial services from regulated lenders, enabling fast, paperless approvals. The company’s credit insights extend this reach beyond Metro Manila, connecting people in distant provinces with feature phones and farming-based incomes.
The company’s platforms have particularly benefited mass market consumers, including women who have seen higher approval rates and sustained credit access, ultimately helping to lower interest rates by guiding consumers toward formal credit.
A financially inclusive economy can serve as an engine for fostering entrepreneurship, investment, job creation and innovation, strengthening the overall financial system. For emerging markets like the Philippines, where financial access remains a critical challenge, this empowerment enables businesses and individuals to improve their livelihoods, build resilience and navigate unexpected crises.
Trusting Social’s credit insights are accelerating this impact, processing an average of 120 billion records weekly and enabling more than 1 million borrowers monthly, facilitating about $500 million in unsecured portfolios. This scale has earned the confidence of more than 50 leading financial institutions and businesses in the Philippines, from top commercial banks to startup lenders. The company said it upholds strict data privacy and security in compliance with GDPR, Philippine and other local laws.
“Our work in the Philippines has been driven by one core belief: that advanced data science can help bridge the financial inclusion divide in the country,” said Johnny Escaler, CEO of Trusting Social Philippines.
Under the National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI) 2022-2028, launched by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in 2022, financial inclusion has been established as a national priority in the Philippines.
While progress has been made, a significant gap remains. A World Bank Global Findex 2025 report showed that only 50.2 percent of Filipino adults had financial accounts in 2024, a statistic that falls short of regional peers and highlights the pressing need for financial inclusion.
