The Ayala Group sees a huge opportunity in digitizing its businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its top executive said in a recent forum.
“We realized that there were tremendous number of products and services that we’re going to have to ride obviously on a digital infrastructure,” Ayala Corp. chairman and chief executive Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala said during the online Pilipinas Conference organized by Stratbase Albert del Rosario Institute.
“When the pandemic hit, there was absolutely no choice. Customers, if you’re focused on them, were thinking about keeping themselves safe and were accessing services and products in completely different ways. That transformation just moved up to a whole other degree,” he said.
Zobel de Ayala said it was unheard of before in the real estate sector that companies could close a sale without the customer actually visiting the lot and actually signing any physical paper.
“We are now able to close a transaction on a piece of property, looking at it visually, exchanging notes virtually, and then signing documents electronically. This whole cycle can be done without someone visiting a site and has been an extraordinary transformation in what has been traditionally a brick-and-mortar oriented company,” said Zobel de Ayala.