UPSEAA lecture 3, Tito Ortiz

The latest speaker for the UP School of Economics Alumni Association (UPSEAA) lectures was Unionbank Chairman Justo "Tito" Ortiz. He is not an alumnus of the school, he's from Ateneo but his bank has many officers who are UPSE alumni, and are active in the Association.

Tito is the first banker who dabbles on political philosophy that I have heard, I wrote it here, Tito Ortiz, the philosopher-banker (June 18, 2019).

His topic that night, June 27, was on corporate digital transformation and AI, subjects that I am not so familiar. 

Among the slides he presented that I like -- i2i. Individual to individual, island to island, institution to institution. Helping micro- and small entrepreneurs even in remote islands via full private sector initiative is possible, is happening, little or no government assistance involved. Though at a limited level, for now.

I think the term here should not be "kill" but perhaps "weaken." Movies, taxi, hotels, retailers, etc. are still there, they did not die, but they have been weakened by new IT-based competitors.

Open banking or Application Programming Interface (API) banking. Tito said that their bank gets 266,000 calls per day on average. If humans would take such huge volume of calls, the bank must hire so many personnel, which will raise their cost, which they must pass to their clients, higher interest rate to borrowers, lower interest to depositors. AI helps bring down costs significantly.

Another slide that I really like, Tito showed this quote from Elinor Ostrom, an American Nobel Prize in Economics awardee in 2009.

Awarding of the Certificate of Appreciation by UPSEAA President Jeffrey (to the right of Tito), with Vice President Rey Regalado and other board members.

Thank you again UPSEAA officers, Unionbank.
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See also: 
UPSEAA lecture 1, Robina Gokongwei-Pe, July 20, 2019
UPSEAA lecture 2, DTI Sec. Mon Lopez, July 21, 2019.