Tonik picks Finastra to power pioneering digital bank in SE Asia

Greg Krasnov, founder and CEO of Tonik

Tonik, the first licensed digital-only bank in Southeast Asia, has selected Fusion Essence in the cloud to power its end-to-end core banking capabilities.

The move will support Tonik as it launches its retail deposit and customer loans services in the Philippines, giving it agility and the ability to scale quickly.

“The banking sector in the Philippines is ripe for digital disruption,” said Greg Krasnov, founder and CEO of Tonik.

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“The country has high internet usage, the majority of Filipinos are unbanked and research shows half of the people who do have bank accounts would be interested in switching to a ‘neobank,’” Krasnov said.

He said Finastra’s Fusion Essence Cloud — powered by Microsoft Azure — will give them the agility to get these services to market quickly and efficiently.

“We are also impressed by the modern, open and scalable capabilities of the solution, particularly the in-built analytics, which will help us to better understand our customers’ smart digital banking needs,” he added.

Providing a customer experience that traditional banks struggle to offer requires modern, cloud-native technology that facilitates innovation whilst future-proofing investment. For Tonik, Fusion Essence Cloud will be deployed out of the Microsoft Azure Southeast Asia Region (Singapore Data Centre), which will allow for both low latency and data residency.

Tonik will benefit from a low cost of entry into the market, ease and speed of deployment, and the ability to increase business volumes and diversify its product set cost-effectively. It will also benefit from ongoing software updates and, in time, access to further innovation via FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra’s platform for open innovation and the development of applications.

Fusion Essence Cloud is already powering European neobanks, including revverbank and Gravity, and this deployment in Southeast Asia is expected to help bring the benefits of innovative digital banking to the Philippines.

Anand Subbaraman, general manager of retail banking at Finastra, said Tonik is well positioned to replicate the disruption that has taken place in Europe, where digital banks have quickly attracted millions of customers and billions of dollars in investor funding.