Picture a nurse finishing a night shift in a Los Angeles hospital, checking her phone in the parking lot before she drives home, or an engineer in Silicon Valley, stepping out of a meeting to send money before the exchange rate shifts again. A doctor between rounds. A seafarer in international waters, waiting for signal to return. A freelancer at 11 p.m., closing a project and opening a banking app in the same beat.
I thought about all of them last week, standing in a ballroom in Torrance, California, at the International Asian American Business Expo (IAABE).
Los Angeles alone is home to more than 400,000 Filipinos. That’s a stadium full of nurses and engineers and seafarers and freelancers, all carrying a country with them wherever they go.
In 2025, overseas Filipinos sent home $39.6 billion. This is an all-time high. That’s more than seven percent of the Philippines’ entire GDP, and it didn’t come from a single conglomerate, a sovereign fund, or a single headline-grabbing deal. It came from millions of individual transfers of different amounts, big and small.
When something hits seven percent of a nation’s GDP, that becomes the whole industry. Our OFWs deserve to be treated as core national infrastructure, not just a statistic in a remittance report. It’s infrastructure built by people, and run on love, determination and grit.
Speaking on the IAABE stage wasn’t something I fully appreciated until this year. What started as a single conversation on July 12th, at the Philippine independence commemoration in Los Angeles, turned into a significant collaboration with the Coalition of Filipino American Chambers of Commerce within weeks. That’s the value of these gatherings that doesn’t always make it into a press release. They compress years of relationship-building into a handful of honest conversations, in rooms full of people who have every reason to hold institutions like ours to a higher standard.
A bank can talk about “bridging” the Philippines and its diaspora all it wants. That word only means something if a mother in Torrance can actually send tuition home without losing a cut to fees. Suppose a son can open an account without needing a Social Security Number. If a family can finally open the business venture they’ve been saving toward for years, from a different time zone than the one their business will operate in.
We should be building toward fewer fees, not more features.
The question “what does this actually cost a family, in time and in fees?” is the one we keep coming back to at RCBC. It’s why we built the Philippines’ first US virtual account, in partnership with Meridian, that a loved one back home can open themselves in under two minutes, using nothing but a Philippine ID.
Why we added a hold-and-convert feature, so families decide when their dollars become pesos, not the market. Why, since the 4th of July, RCBC Pulz users get free, unlimited InstaPay and PESONet transfers with no cap. And why, starting this August through January 2027, we’re waiving US wire transfer fees on transfers into an RCBC US Virtual Account.
The key to empathetically sustainable design choices is removing that small piece of friction between an OFW and the family they’re supporting. Friction, multiplied across millions of transfers, is where most of that $39.6 billion leaks away.
The conversations in Torrance didn’t stop at what RCBC had already built. Filipino-American business leaders raised real use cases we’re still working through: facilitating real estate payments from the US into the Philippines, and eventually, transactions moving the other direction, from the Philippines into the US.
Borderless already has a working blueprint in our own backyard. Under ASEAN’s Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, QR Ph, PayNow, DuitNow, and PromptPay are now interoperable across borders. This means a Thai tourist in Singapore can scan a local QR code with a linked app, with money settling in seconds at competitive rates and no card network involved. Cross-border QR transactions across ASEAN hit 12.9 million in just the first half of 2025. That’s proof that when regulators align, families and small businesses feel it first, in fewer fees and faster transfers.
But being “borderless” requires so much more. It’s the slow, deliberate work of building financial infrastructure that doesn’t care which side of the Pacific you’re standing on. It’s infrastructure that treats a nurse in LA and her family in Bulacan as two ends of the same relationship, not two separate markets.
This is also why collaborative engagements with the Department of Migrant Workers and the Commission on Filipinos Overseas are important.
Euromoney has named RCBC the Philippines’ Best Bank for Digital for seven consecutive years, the first bank in Asia to do so. RCBC Pulz was also recently recognized by The Asian Banker as the Best Digital Ecosystem and Platform Initiative in the Philippines, citing how the US Virtual Account gives Filipinos greater control over receiving, holding, and converting their dollar income.
I’m proud of the awards. But it matters less to me than the more silent version of that same story, playing out every day in break rooms and job sites across the world: someone, somewhere, sending a piece of home back home, and having a little more of it actually arrive.
That scale of remittance flow isn’t a reason to pause and admire the numbers. It’s a mandate to keep building. RCBC has been around for 65 years, and what that history has taught us is that showing up for a Filipino family means showing up for the moments that matter most. The first house, the first business, the day someone leaves to build a better life elsewhere.
The conversations in Torrance, like earlier ones with the Philippine Consuls General in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, point toward the same horizon: broader digital access, more efficient links between two markets, and a bridge that keeps getting stronger.
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Lito Villanueva is the Philippines’ leading and award-winning thought leader in inclusive digital finance. As EVP and chief innovation and inclusion officer of RCBC, he has driven large-scale digital initiatives that advanced financial inclusion. He is the founding chairman of FinTech Alliance PH, representing 95 percent of the country’s digital retail financial transactions with an aggregate user base in excess of 100 million, and the co-founder and global ambassador of the Asia FinTech Alliance. Recognized as a People Asia Men Who Matter 2025, Digital Leader of the Year, Asia Trailblazer and AGORA Awardee, he continues to shape the fintech landscape in the Philippines and beyond.