Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) recently partnered with Connected Women, a social impact startup that helps Filipino women find online careers, to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions contextualized for the Philippine audience.

Based in the Philippines, Connected Women is a multi-awarded social impact startup that helps Filipino women reach their goals by providing training for entrepreneurship, freelancing, and remote work.  Now with over 75,000 members in its community, Connected Women is focusing on providing socially responsible AI & digital task outsourcing, ultimately creating livelihood opportunities for women in both urban and rural areas.

With this, UnionBank’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Group has tapped Connected Women for the development of contextualized AI Solutions. Through the data provided by Connected Women’s community, UnionBank will develop AI solutions that are best tuned to the needs and requirements of the local market. By doing so, UnionBank hopes to develop relevant solutions that will connect with the communities it serves.

“This project aims to deliver innovations in technology while empowering Filipino women through work opportunities,” said UnionBank Head of AI Center of Excellence, Dr. Adrienne Heinrich.

“This partnership is a win-win for everyone involved, allowing us to support the development of financial inclusion solutions for Filipinos while creating work-from-home career opportunities for women in our community. We are delighted to partner with UnionBank to provide socially responsible AI & digital task outsourcing for their AI initiatives,” said Connected Women CEO Gina Romero.

UnionBank’s AI innovations are developed and rolled out with the Filipino experience in mind. The partnership with Connected Women is a step towards getting insights from the Filipino workforce to make the technology more relevant to the market.

“We believe that there is a huge potential in using AI to uplift the lives of Filipinos. We partnered with Connected Women to help our team contextualize the technology through the real-life experiences of Filipinos working online,” UnionBank President & CEO Edwin Bautista shared.

This partnership is also consistent with the Bank’s commitment to improve its products and services and make them more useful to the Filipino end-users. The Bank leverages on data science and AI as main drivers for digital transformation, putting the customers at the heart of it. DSAI aims to empower Filipinos by offering solutions that are specifically made for them.