SINGAPORE — Overseas Filipino workers and ordinary people with little or no access to banking have a lot to look forward to with artificial intelligence, or AI, driving financial technical innovations in the months to come.

UnionDigital Bank executives Henry Aguda and Mike Singh on Thursday announced to journalists attending the Singapore Fintech Festival 2023 that 2024 will be a game-changer year for the banking behemoth and its allied companies like UnionDigital Bank and UBX.

SFF 2023 drew to a close on Friday with hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of attendees, many of them young people hoping to become the next Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, as they looked for ideas and financing for startup companies they want to put up.

Amid the din of the veritable agora of tech germination in what may emerge as the biggest "revenge" staging of SFF, Aguda noted that "blockchain" was the buzzword for the 2022 holding of the festival. For this year, it's undoubtedly AI, he said.

Looking at his crystal ball, Aguda, president and chief executive of Ubeh and chairman of UBX Philippines, as well as vice chair of Union Bank City Savings, predicted that "purpose-bound" financial transactions will take the world by storm next year.

For OFWs, according to Aguda, this would mean purpose-bound remittances from wherever they are in the world to their families in the Philippines or their basket of diversified investments.

Seventh appearance

"This has become a tradition for Union Bank. So we've been coming here for six years, and this is our seventh," Aguda said in a roundtable discussion with Singh, a standout UAAP player for Ateneo in the 1990s, and journalists at the second floor of UB's tech-heavy exhibit at SFF 2023.