Binangonan Rural Bank Inc. or BRB, licensed by Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) in 2017, is in the unique position of combining its history since 1961 and reputation of a legacy financial institution with the enhanced capabilities of e-money transactions. BRB is the first rural bank in the Philippines to launch e-money operations, enabling its members' customers to transact at ATMs, point-of-sale (POS) terminals, web and mobile platforms.

Binangonan Rural Bank launched a brand new mobile payment service in March 2022. However, the lack of development resource and industry security compliance experience have seriously impacted the business launch progress. • 3 months prior to the launch, there were still key functions that were not available in the app, along with bugs and errors causing the system to behave unexpectedly. • Only the development and test environment is built for the back-end system, while the production environment has not yet been set up. • The account opening process lacks remote identity verification (eKYC) capabilities, and in turn, impacting poor user experience and account opening industry compliance. • In terms of system security and compliance, the application still lacks security reinforcement capabilities, and is in a high-risk state without protection and contingency plan. With a strict timeline and limited development resources available, BRB needed a series of out-of-the-box cloud services which can be seamlessly integrated to build a secure, easy-to-use, and compliant financial-grade mobile payment app.

With Alibaba Cloud's experience and best practices in the financial industry, BRB adopts Alibaba Cloud's end-to-end solution, including mPaaS, ZOLOZ Real ID, application hosting, and security. From a security and compliance perspective, the solution enables the system with high security capabilities – detecting system vulnerabilities in advance through penetration testing, identifying system risk defects, and use of Security Center to improve host security. Fortinet Next Generation Firewall or NGFW available on the Marketplace paired with Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS, effectively protect the system against intrusion attacks, while Bastionhost is also adopted to further improve O&M security. This solution is proposed with Alibaba Cloud financial technology innovation, stable cloud infrastructure and reliable security protection capabilities, effectively facilitating the application delivery and customer service launch.

• mPaaS helps customer build stable and easily operated mobile technical middle-end (including Mobile Push, Mobile Gateway, and Mini Program), effectively guaranteeing the high-quality delivery of the app, and enriching the app interaction capabilities and user experience. • In the context of stringent financial eKYC supervision, Alibaba Cloud won the trust of business product department, risk control, compliance and technology departments, based on in-depth integration test between ZOLOZ Real ID and customer service, as well as security compliance assessment. • With the advantage of the local Philippine cloud region, customer seamlessly migrates the non-production to Alibaba Cloud, and quickly set up the production system using Server Load Balancer (SLB), Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN), Elastic Compute Service (ECS), ApsaraDB for Redis, and ApsaraDB for RDS.

Partnering with Alibaba Cloud, Binangonan Rural Bank was able to adopt a series of top-notch cloud services which can be rapidly integrated to build a secure, easy-to-use, and compliant financial-grade mobile payment app, considering timeline and development resource constraints. This project also successfully laid the foundation for deepening collaboration of both companies in the future, including other capabilities such as A+ wallet, mPaaS advanced functions, AML and other Ant Group capabilities, among others.