The Philippines’ Department of Education (DepEd) and the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) have teamed up to promote digital savings among students, parents, and teachers amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a virtual briefer on February 23, RCBC announced the launch of an incentive promotion through its finance app DiskarTech to the over 27.5 million students, parents, and teachers nationwide.

“As DepEd also integrated financial literacy in our K-12 curriculum, partnership programs like DiskarTech of RCBC will allow our teachers and learners to experience how technology works for us while we are securing our finances and save for the most important and unanticipated events such as the Covid-19 pandemic,” DepEd Undersecretary for Finance Annalyn M. Sevilla said.

The RCBC said DiskarTech users will have a chance to win the equivalent amount of their average daily balance during the month-long promo. Qualified transactions within the app, including free fund transfers, cash-ins, and bills payment, have an equivalent number of raffle entries.

Aside from this, prepaid phone credits worth PHP1,000, called “AyuData” or ayudang mobile data, are also up for grabs to lucky promo winners. These electronic load prizes are a month’s worth of mobile data that may be used by learners and teachers for online schooling.

“With the shift to blended learning modality, there had been challenges faced not just by our learners, but most especially by our teachers, and parents. This collaboration aims to address some of those pain points while further empowering and enabling all our stakeholders in the education sector through this digital platform. We made digital savings fun and exciting,” RCBC executive vice president and chief innovation and inclusion officer Lito Villanueva said.

In a 2019 study, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the country’s central bank, said 53% of adult Filipinos are savers but 51% of them save at home.

The survey showed that while account ownership has improved in the last two years, more than two-thirds of Filipinos still lack access to a formal account.

Philippine News Agency