MANILA, Philippines — Multisys Technologies Corp., the software development and IT solutions arm of multimedia giant PLDT Inc., is developing more smart cities to help the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in shifting the country into a cash-lite economy.
Multisys founder David Almirol Jr. said the company continues to talk with local government units (LGUs) to build digital services portals and facilitate easier transactions as the BSP pushes the use of electronic payments amid the coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 outbreak.
“Smart city is a project of Multisys wherein we help residents and various enterprises to transact with its local government conveniently online,” he said.
The smart city project enables residents to go cashless with their tax payments, permit transactions, and RFID cards. This also empowers small enterprise owners by providing a better financial and bookkeeping method.
Multisys is leveraging the secure and scalable cloud environment of Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) that offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, mobile, security, among others.
“As technology enablers, we need powerful allies like AWS, who we can work with to attain our vision of a smarter Philippines. We are more effective and efficient because of them,” he said.
Use of AWS organizations enabled effective cost charge-back to the end-customers while still keeping the ease of managing payments to AWS through consolidated billing. What took two weeks now takes less than four hours.
The company has seen a major uptick in the projects coming in since the enhanced community quarantine was put in place on March 16 as partners from both the public and private sectors ramped up their digital transformation initiatives via their own online portals for e-commerce and operations.
“We have already welcomed an additional 50 employees since the start of the year. We target to hire over 100 more, and we are well on our way toward achieving this number,” he said.
BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno has committed that half of total financial transactions in the country would be digital by the middle of 2023.
Latest data from the Better Than Cash Alliance (BTCA) showed the share of cashless transactions increased to 10 percent in 2018 from only one percent in 2013 in terms of volume and to 20 percent from eight percent in terms of value.