Don’t even think of arguing with Edwin Bautista, president, chief executive and director of Union Bank of the Philippines.
Getting the upper hand in a verbal joust with him is next to impossible because he was a champion debater back in college days at the De La Salle University.
On graduation day, the DLSU conferred to him its very first Brother Gabriel Conon Award for being the Most Outstanding Graduate, on top of a leadership award.
Bautista completed his Mechanical Engineering course at DLSU, then obtained a Master of Business Administration from Harvard.
He has been at the helm of multiple companies. He is chairman of City Savings Bank Inc. and sits at the board of nine other companies.
The man is also a master storyteller, another asset in his arsenal of strengths that empowered him with the ability to “relate and connect with people from all walks of life.”
Bautista launched his corporate journey as a brand manager of Procter & Gamble, later president of the International Exchange Bank which eventually merged with Union Bank.
He joined UnionBank in 1997 as senior vice president, performing crucial roles in transaction banking, credit cards, retail banking, auto and mortgage, corporate product banking and digital banking.
UnionBank eventually embarked on a vigorous digitalization program, giving rise to UBX, a financial technology company offering open finance solutions.
Bautista explained that UBX was designed to explore “emerging technologies such as distributed ledger technologies or the token economy, engage fintechs to learn more about the financial landscape’s future direction, and make technology its core to deliver platforms where financial services can be embedded”.
In retrospect, UnionBank was initially jittery about the digital transformation endeavor and even hired a top management consultant group to help foresee what the immediate future holds for the company.
“Their conclusion and recommendations hit us like a bullet because they said the only way forward was to digitize or perish. What we expected to be a strategic plan overhaul became an existential threat,” Bautista told the CEO Magazine in an interview.
“In 2016, we started the biggest preparation for disruption via our digital transformation. Back then, we anticipated that customer behavior and needs would drastically change due to the rapid acceptance of mobile digital technology such as smartphones, smartpads, the use of apps and so on,” he said.
It turned out that the digitalization move was a game changer—and a winner—for UnionBank, and this was made more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While most Philippine banks reeled under the debilitating effects of the pandemic, UnionBank stayed the course on account of its digital transformation that powered its shift to online operations, defying the pandemic.
With the enhanced quarantine in effect, UnionBank quickly shifted to work-from-home arrangements. “In the beginning, 90 per cent of UnionBankers were working from home, including our operations team, marketing team and customer service team. Remarkably, all major bank operations continued to run very smoothly,” he said.
Bautista shares some words of wisdom. “History is written by the victors. So we only write about our successes and never failures. But in reality, I think, I wouldn’t say failures in the negative sense, but failures that serve as stepping stones to success.”
