PhilippinesBankingScale · $100K
BDO Unibank

Serve the Philippines' largest banking base — and its overseas workers in every time zone — from one governed voice layer

BDO's scale spans 1,600+ branches and millions of OFW families; agentic service delivers branch-grade answers by phone and chat at any hour in any hemisphere, while defending customers against the scam wave hitting Philippine banking.

Entry use case
Card and account servicing with fraud-safe actions
Expected outcome
Reduced call-center load on top servicing intents and faster, safer response to suspected-fraud contacts
Recommended next step
Risk-first briefing with retail-bank and contact-center heads: staged pilot design starting with read-only remittance status, expanding to bounded card actions.
What we understand

BDO Unibank's operating reality

BDO Unibank, the SM Group's banking arm, is the Philippines' largest bank by assets with over 1,600 branches and the country's broadest retail footprint, including BDO Network Bank for rural reach.

Public fact

BDO is a leading player in the OFW remittance corridor, with remittance services marketed across the Middle East, Asia, and North America.

Public fact

Philippine banks, BDO included, have faced widely publicized phishing and account-takeover waves, making fraud-related service both high-volume and high-stakes.

Public fact

OFW customers contact from time zones where Manila office hours are useless — 24/7 conversational capability is a genuine differentiator, not a luxury.

Reasoned inference

As a conservative market leader, BDO will move on proof and risk containment, not innovation narrative.

Reasoned inference

Validate with the account team before outreach: Cloud and outsourcing posture for customer-facing AI at the group level · Remittance-platform API availability for status grounding · Which servicing intents the bank will permit for bounded automation first

Build vs buy

Why we have a right to win here

Buy-led target

Limited internal ability or appetite to build the core platform — strong candidate for the packaged solution

Evidence: A conservative, scale-led market leader whose technology posture is vendor-based core and channel systems; BDO has no appetite to build AI platforms and will buy proven, risk-contained solutions in deliberate stages.

Why they won't build the full stack: BDO's strength is distribution and balance-sheet scale, not software engineering; a staged vendor deployment with contractual accountability matches its risk culture and its posture with the BSP far better than any internal build.

What management is signalling

Philippine bank results commentary emphasizes consumer-lending growth and digital-channel adoption, implying servicing scale and fraud response are rising cost and trust lines for the market leader.

Inferencerecent investor communications (validate) · 2025–2026

GTM implication: Lead with a read-only, risk-contained pilot (remittance status) that proves control before proposing any action automation — sequencing is the sale at BDO.

What already exists (don't pitch this)
  • BDO Online and mobile apps
  • 1,600+ branch network and call centers
  • Remittance services marketed across OFW corridors
What customers still can't do end-to-end (pitch this)
  • →24/7 servicing across OFW time zones
  • →In-conversation card and account actions
  • →Instant remittance-status answers without agent lookup
  • →Minutes-fast suspected-fraud triage
Opportunity map

Where agentic communications pays off first

WorkflowWhy it matters hereValueComplexitySpeedChannels
Card & account servicing
Top servicing intents (blocks, limits, disputes, statements) completed in-conversation with full audit.
The largest customer base in the country produces the largest servicing queue in the country.
Friction today: Branch visits and long IVR queues for actions a governed agent could complete.
VoiceIn-appViber/WhatsApp
OFW remittance status & support
Instant remittance-status answers and issue triage around the clock, in Taglish or Cebuano.
Remittances are emotionally critical transfers; 'where is my money' calls span every time zone.
Friction today: Manila-hours support for a 24-hour diaspora; status requires agent lookup.
Viber/WhatsAppVoice
Suspected-fraud rapid response
Immediate triage with policy-bounded protective actions and specialist handoff with complete context.
Scam-wave contacts are trust-defining moments where minutes matter.
Friction today: Victims wait in general queues while damage compounds.
VoiceIn-app
Watch the change

Card and account servicing with fraud-safe actions: today vs the agentic model

Scenario: A nurse in Dubai checks her Manila-bound remittance at 3am Philippine time, gets the live status in Taglish, and flags a card issue that is fixed in the same conversation.
Today
same interaction, two worlds
Agentic layer
First-contact resolution
deferred via tickets
in-conversation actions
Platform capability
Cost per contact
$13.50 median assisted
$1.84 median self-service
Benchmark
QA coverage
1–2% sampled
100% scored
Platform capability
Sources & assumptions
  • · First-contact resolution: Process design: agent acts in systems of record
  • · Cost per contact: Gartner customer service cost benchmarks, 2024
  • · QA coverage: Platform capability: every interaction logged and evaluated
  • · Gartner, customer service cost benchmarks (2024): $13.50 median assisted vs $1.84 self-service per contact
  • · McKinsey, digital-first collections research: 20–25% NPL reduction among leaders; up to 40% opex reduction with gen AI
  • · Baymard Institute: ~70% average cart abandonment (meta-analysis)
  • · IAMAI–Kantar via IBEF (2025): 900M+ Indian internet users; 98% consume Indic-language content
  • · LeadSquared and vendor funnel studies: 78% of students choose the first institution to respond (directional, vendor data)
  • · HDI / ITSM operator benchmarks: $15–25 per L1 ticket; 40–60% of L1 volume is resets/status (validate per customer)
  • · Conventional-flow wait times and volumes are typical operator patterns — assumptions to replace with the customer's own baseline
  • · Agentic-flow behaviors (context retention, 100% logging, in-line policy checks) are platform capabilities, not projections
Recommended solution

One integrated stack, opinionated for this account

Channels · Tilicho Labs
VoiceIn-appViber/WhatsApp

Voice & channel orchestration, telephony, conversational execution, session/state, routing, integration build. Capability coverage validated during implementation.

Intelligence · Google Cloud
Gemini reasoningEnterprise groundingWorkflow agentsMulti-agent orchestrationGoverned actionsEvaluation & analytics
Systems · BDO Unibank
Core bankingCard managementRemittance platformCorrespondent feedsFraud engineAccount management

API access to these systems is the critical-path dependency.

Trust & languages
Filipino/TagalogEnglishCebuano

Identity-bound sessions, policy-bounded actions, 100% audit logging, human approvals at defined points, in-tenant intelligence.

Business case

The economics, with your numbers

Addressable monthly interactions4.0M
Seller assumption — replace in discovery
Current cost per interaction ($)$1.2
Industry benchmark scale — validate
Automation / assistance rate (%)55%
Seller assumption — pilot proves this
$4.8M
Current operating cost / mo
$22.4M
Modelled gross benefit / yr
0.1 mo
Payback on Scale
242%
3-yr ROI (modelled)
Automated/assisted interactions per month2.2M
Modelled AI run-cost per month (usage + cloud, system estimate)$770K
New monthly operating cost$2.9M

All figures are modelling estimates from the labeled inputs above — nothing here is customer-provided yet. The pilot's first job is replacing these assumptions with BDO Unibank's measured baseline. Package price covers implementation only; recurring usage billed separately.

Recommended package

Scale — $100K implementation

Scale · $100K · A multi-channel production deployment10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows

Why this package for BDO Unibank: Card servicing, remittance status, and collections are distinct high-volume workflows across one retail franchise — a Scale deployment with a conservative, staged rollout.

Included
  • 4–6 channels
  • 2–3 priority workflows
  • Multiple enterprise integrations
  • API credential & security setup
  • Advanced orchestration
  • Multilingual support
  • Agent Assist / human escalation
  • Production analytics
  • Expansion roadmap
Not included
  • ✕Usage & consumption (billed separately)
  • ✕Enterprise-wide governance build-out
  • ✕Multi-BU rollout
Recurring costs (separate from the package)

Packages cover implementation and integration only. Recurring costs are billed separately: Tilicho Labs platform usage (~$0.15/call-min indicative, usage only), Google Cloud consumption, telephony/carrier charges, managed operations, and support & optimization. No package includes unlimited usage.

Customer resources required
  • · API access + credentials for: Core banking, Card management, Remittance platform
  • · A named business owner for card and account servicing with fraud-safe actions
  • · Security review counterpart and policy sign-off (Core banking scope)
  • · Baseline metrics for the pilot's success thresholds
Executive messages

What to say to whom

CEO

“BDO wins by being everywhere its customers are. An agentic layer extends 'everywhere' to every hour and every time zone the OFW franchise lives in.”

CIO / CTO

“Deployment is staged and conservative by design: read-only grounding first, policy-bounded actions second, every step logged to bank standards.”

COO

“Your contact center carries the country's largest servicing load. Automating the top ten intents is the single biggest capacity lever available to you.”

Head of Retail & Remittance Business

“Remittance loyalty is won at 3am Manila time. Around-the-clock status and support in the customer's language protects the corridor franchise.”

Chief Risk / Compliance Officer

“Fraud-response automation acts only within pre-approved bounds, and 100% conversation capture strengthens both BSP conduct evidence and dispute defense.”

CFO / Procurement

“Even at Philippine seat costs, your volume makes automation math decisive; the pilot proves cost per contact on your own queues before any commitment to scale.”

Outreach

Pre-built offer emails for BDO Unibank

Written from this account's own research — the strategic signal, the capability gap, the entry workflow, and the modelled economics — not a mail-merge template. Pick the moment and the persona, edit anything, then copy or open in your mail client.

Moment in the deal
Cold outreach — no prior conversation
Who it's addressed to
Cares about: The workflow itself and its daily failure modes
Register
Length
Draft — edit freely before sending
Open in mail client

Customer-safe by construction: drafts are composed only from customer-facing fields. Account tier, build-vs-buy classification, priority score, internal routing, and partner-commercial detail are not inputs to the composer, so they cannot appear in a draft. Money figures are always framed as modelled from the customer's own volumes. Read before sending — you own what goes out.

The pursuit

Tier 1 — immediate strategic pursuit

Why this tier

The Philippines' largest bank by assets with the country's biggest branch network, a massive OFW remittance franchise, and correspondingly massive contact volume — conservative culture, enormous prize.

30 / 60 / 90-day plan
  • Day 0–30: Risk-first briefing with retail-bank and contact-center heads: staged pilot design starting with read-only remittance status, expanding to bounded card actions.; confirm sponsor and baseline data access; validate: Cloud and outsourcing posture for customer-facing AI at the group level
  • Day 31–60: architecture & security review with the platform team; Tilicho Labs scoping on Voice + In-app; pilot scope signed
  • Day 61–90: Scale package kickoff; card and account servicing with fraud-safe actions pilot in build; success thresholds locked with the Head of Retail & Remittance Business
Recommended next step

Risk-first briefing with retail-bank and contact-center heads: staged pilot design starting with read-only remittance status, expanding to bounded card actions.

Entry: Card and account servicing with fraud-safe actions · Scale package · 10–14 weeks to production across priority workflows. Human fallback throughout; success thresholds agreed before build.

Start the pursuit

Research-based priority-account universe assembled from public information, market scale, communication volume, and solution fit. This is NOT an authoritative list of top Google Cloud customers; existing Google Cloud relationships are noted only where publicly reported. Validate every account with the account team before outreach.