There is no truth to the widely-held belief that the poor and the desperate, given half the chance, always run with the money, UnionBank President and CEO Edwin R. Bautista said on Thursday.

In ceremonies marking the success of the lender’s all-digital branch called The Ark by UnionBank, Bautista said even the global charitable institution Oxfam was so impressed by how the victims of the typhooon Yolanda in and around Tacloban City in Leyte conducted themselves when they were given e-money cards with which to make purchases.

He said people generally believe that the poor always max out the cash cards given them by charitable organizations in the aftermath of every calamity that strikes them, which is why most donors would rather donate goods instead of cash for fear that the relief would last no more than a minute.

“No, that is a myth,” Bautista quickly told reporters. According to him, at least 43 perent of the Yolanda relief recipients left some of the money intact in the e-money cards they were given for future use.

“They kept the money there and used it (later) to buy groceries, which was a good thing,” he said.

This incident and similar other events, debunk the popular notion that the poor and destitute always cashes the entire doleout and leaves nothing for the next day, according to Bautista.

It also accounts for part of their collective optimism that the Filipino, whether or not he has engaged anything remotely looking like a bank, would go digital and allow banks like UnionBank to engage in it in full and with the profits to show for the effort.

He argued that the 20 percent digital payment target of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas by 2020 has actually happened. According to him, the recipients of the conditional cash transfer of the government has made that goal happen ahead of the expected timeline.

“That 20 percent (of the population going digital) is already done. They all pay for goods via their cash cards,” Bautista said.

For UnionBank alone, he said the goal is to achieve 80 percent of all their transactions signed, sealed and delivered in the digital sphere.

He acknowledged that the Singaporean behemoth known as DBS, which took the digital route many years ahead of UnionBank, has achieved a digital penetration rate of around 60 percent.

“When we reach the magic number 80, we can then consider ourselves a digital bank. That, to us is the yardstick, that one is digital more than anything, Bautista said.

He explained that 80 percent digital is important because they found out that digital-savvy clients typically have four times the deposit, engage the bank six times more than the non-digital customers and that UnionBank itself typically makes 12 times more money from their digital clients than from the non-digital segment.

Bautista said the digital client tend to keep their money at the bank and use their card to make purchases at various merchants with points-of-sale terminals.

In each of those virtual transactions, Bautista pointed out, the bank charges a minimal fee of one percent.

He said UnionBank services more than three million clients across the Philippines and that some 44 percent or 400,000 have since transited to the digital space, including not just the millenials but the pension people as well.

“You’d be surprised the pensioners are not the last to adopt to the digital space but no, they are often the first, especially because they wait for the pension to be credited to their accounts and link their mobile phones to our alert service,” Bautista said.

According to him, the goal for now is to grow the three million digital customers to 50 million.

How soon UnionBank achieves that number is anyone’s guess.