MANILA, PHILIPPINES — BUx, the Philippines’ leading all-in-one payment solutions platform operated by the country’s leader in open finance UBX, recorded a 33x surge in transaction volume in 2021, processing billions of pesos in gross transaction value, hitting its profitability targets as planned.
The unprecedented growth was driven by an expanded portfolio of e-merchant partners across a wide range of industries, including SMEs, enterprises, marketplaces, and marketplace aggregators.
“BUx has grown exponentially over the last eight months, with our transaction volumes peaking in December. We also added over 1 million in transaction volumes in one month alone in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our leap from being just a payment gateway to an SME and Enterprise solutions provider for anything and everything payment helped us in expanding the business and turning a profit last year,” UBx Managing Director for Commerce and Payment Jaime P. Garchitorena said.
BUx is an end-to-end payment solutions platform that allows merchants of all sizes to accept all forms of payment. It unifies payment channels from card payments, bank transfers, over-the-counter payments, to e-wallets into one solution.
It has the most extensive payments network in the Philippines with over 50,000 access points and 30 payment partner channels, covering virtually all of the payment channels required by merchants.
Aside from providing customers with payments solutions, BUx also enables businesses with its best-in-class dashboard that allows real time tracking of requests for payments sent, payments pending, and payments made.
“The pandemic pushed online commerce into hyper adoption not just by SMEs and gig workers, but large enterprises as well. So the challenge for BUx was to come up with a suite of solutions that should be applicable whether you are a freelancer, small business sole proprietor, or a multi-branch large enterprise,” Garchitorena explained.
“Fortunately, BUx not only has good technology bones to scale quickly, but also has what we call the “unfair advantage” of an entire suite of available solutions and services from UBx.”
“UBx has an Open Finance driven cross-platform integration that allowed BUx to quickly evolve from a payment gateway into an all-in-one financial services platform. This includes a nationwide disbursement capability, and even a path to credit for our merchants and their customers,” he added.
“A common comment from our SME merchants is that selling is the easy part, it’s the collections and managing cash flows that give them the most problems. So our plan is to build more features within our platform that will help businesses — especially MSMEs to focus more on their sales and operations rather than worrying about tracking their finances. These include a basic profit-and-loss solution, a more robust point-of-sale system, and easy access to verified transactional data to use for getting loans,” Garchitorena said.
As the market continues to evolve and businesses adapt the continued shift in customer behavior to the digital, BUx is bullish that it will further grow the business this year.
“Responding to feedback from our merchant partners, our direction for 2022 is multi-pronged. For payments, our goals are to begin to see how we can accommodate cross border transactions, crypto payments, and real time payouts to solve some of the bigger problems of SMEs that want to tap international markets. To support business operations of our merchant partners, BUx will be looking to develop merchant tools that allow them to leverage off the data generated by customer transactions to all customers to safely and responsibly increase spending through personal credit and other non-card financing options, to provide their customers a better overall ecommerce and in-store experience,” Garchitorena said.
BUx is committed to continuously pursue innovation with plans to introduce more solutions and services that can significantly reduce friction in the way people transact this year.
