A ‘massive’ financial education campaign must be rolled out in the Philippines to shield consumers from fraud amid the advent of artificial intelligence-enabled technologies, according to the head of the fintech industry group in the Philippines.
FinTech Alliance.PH Chairman Lito M. Villanueva said during a forum last Tuesday the campaign must be geared toward consumers.
‘If you’re talking about who’s the weakest link in terms of the entire ecosystem around cyber fraud, definitely one loophole is consumer protection, or the consumers themselves, because in Filipino, ‘budol’ is real, right?’ Villanueva added.
He said that such a campaign is all the more needed ‘because of the advent or the proliferation of agentic AI or AI-enabled technologies.’
‘Ordinary consumers would not be able to determine what’s real and what’s not, right?’ he added.
Villanueva said this responsibility falls on the shoulders of industry players.
‘That’s really the challenge amongst players in the industry. If there is one thing or commonality across all competitors in the industry, that is really about sharing fraud data insofar as helping to combat fraud as an industry,’ he added.
According to Villanueva, cybersecurity issues should be ironed out alongside gaps or barrier to scale inclusive digital finance if the country wants to embrace digital transformation.
‘It’s definitely not just on data infrastructure, not just on enabling regulatory framework, but also cybersecurity,’ he said.
According to Villanueva, issues on cybersecurity must be faced head-on because ‘if you are to look at statistics right now, you’ve seen double-digit growth year-on-year in terms of cyber fraud.’ He cited the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (Afasa) as one of the ‘good interventions’ to address the so-called gaps.
Villanueva said that efforts must go beyond the law, reiterating the ‘practical’ need to have a ‘massive’ financial education campaign.
He, however, didn’t explain how ‘massive’ this campaign should be.