With more businesses going online and adopting digital payments, Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) designed its UPAY for MSME offering to be as simple and as easy to use.

Citing expensive onboarding rates and complicated user interface design, UnionBank aims to encourage more businesses to adopt a digital payment system that will enable them to further expand their reach and offerings. Launched this year, UPAY can accept payments via Unionbank Online, InstaPay, digital wallets, credit or debit cards, and also through over-the-counter.

“We have seen changes in the way MSMEs conduct business and we have also seen quick pivot into the digital space brought about by environmental factors,” said Jaypee Soliman, VP and head of MSME segment at UnionBank. “We need to empower the future of MSMEs through innovations leveraging technology-powered services that will allow them to be resilient to whatever comes in the future.”

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UPAY offers a fully integrated, single platform payment collection complete with other features that can make inbound payments easier for entrepreneurs, including the option to generate payment links with multiple collection channels, and the option to generate InstaPay QRPH for digital and physical channels.

UPAY is built inside UnionBank’s MSME business banking app so there is no need to set up another app. Real-time payment is reflected on the businesses’ back end but payment processing with partner financial services institutions takes a couple of days.

Businesses also take control of the timing of the payments by giving them the ability to put an expiry date and time in the payment links. This feature can be most helpful for sellers with fast-moving products.

Through the new payment platform, UnionBank wants to level the playing field for MSMEs by making the feature accessible to them, which was previously only available to the bigger merchants as part of enterprise platforms that are too technologically demanding and expensive for smaller players.