FILIPINOS are a generous, giving people.
Whenever a supertyphoon leaves parts of the country in ruins, a particularly damaging earthquake has hit environmentally sensitive areas, or war-torn provinces are suddenly evacuated with an uncertain future in store for relocated residents, we often do our best to help.
We either go to the nearest bank and deposit in the savings account of the Philippine National Red Cross, or drop-off care packages with the Department of Social Welfare and Development. In many small communities, mothers often take care of other families’ children when needed, which is another sign of our giving nature.
And yet, while we want to do more for others, we often can’t find the time to go out of our way to gather all these provisions, or perhaps give more out of our pocket because our funds are tied up to other payables, like utility bills, rent, debt, etc. Amid this, Filipinos are avid shoppers, with a growing number of us buying stuff on Lazada, Zalora and an ever-increasing number of online stores.
So what if we could just shop at our favorite online clothing store or eat at the newest dining destination, and upon payment—with our credit or debit cards—a portion of the payment goes to our favorite charity running soup kitchens in the Baseco Compound in Tondo, or a socio-civic NGO that’s helping farmers plant and market their coffee beans to consumers?
Trureal, an Ontario-based company, promises to ease the deed of doing good, by offering a platform for charitable organizations, merchants and donors to come together on just one dashboard on your mobile phone or tablets. All of us become a force for good, by being part of its Global Social Network.
Horace Thomas, company chairman and chief executive officer, says he and Trureal vice chairman/cofounder Josephine Zappone “started this in our kitchen table in 2014. You take your loyalty card and swipe it at a store. You have to get that transaction detail back to an infrastructure; but we built that infrastructure so every merchant, every charity, every cardholder gets to use it. We know the charities don’t have the resources to do it, nor do most merchants. So we provided it for them.”
The GSN prepaid card was formally offered in 2016 in Canada, then in the United States, where the Central Bank of Kansas City is its issuing bank.
“In the Philippines we’re in discussions with a couple of banks now,” Horace adds, which can issue the cards. The company will also be exploring partnerships with local charities and organizations as it participates in the League of Corporate Foundations’s CSR Expo this week. “You can imagine now, there’s a typhoon here. I’m in Toronto, then I link up a local [Philippine] charity to my card, then 25 percent of my spending comes here, using one platform,” explains Horace. All that a charitable organization has to do is sign up with Trureal, then “through your normal communications, inform your donors that ‘this year we will be powered by GSN. So please get your GSN card and please link our charity to your card. And thank you for your support.’”
The charity organization eliminates the need for face-to-face solicitation, access professional fundraising services at a fraction of the cost, use a Visa-backed platform with full IT support and payment processing, and tap a growing list of merchants for patrons to shop, thus increasing donations.
For the donor, Horace assures a highly secure platform with no personal data accessed or used outside of the system, as each transaction is only associated with a proxy number. “We revolutionized the way people give to charity. Live and give. They don’t change their behavior,” Josephine stresses.
Data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) show there are 50 million prepaid/debit cards in the country, which includes ATM cards, compared to only 8.4 million credit cards. “We’re starting with debit cards and prepaid cards, but we’ll eventually move to credit cards,” said veteran banker Joey A. Bermudez, and founding chairman of Maybridge Financial Canada and the Philippines, which has partnered with Trureal. He says they are targeting about 1 million cards with the GSN feature to be issued in the Philippines in the next five years.
“We’ll start by asking the charities and nonprofit organizations to sign up first, so we can card their members and constituents,” he explained.
Then the company will ask local merchants to sign up to GSN program.
Jean-Marc Dallaire, Trureal’s head of Southeast Asia, also says local banks can “just put our GSN on their existing card. We don’t need to acquire new customers or spend a lot of money.” Partnering with Trureal also helps commercial banks fulfill their own CSR programs, he points out.
The GSN card comes at a time as global donations are on a decline. According to the World Giving Index of the Charities Aid Foundation for 2017, “The proportion across the world who reported donating money in 2016…is the lowest seen for three years.” It, however, does not reveal the exact amounts donated. The index is based on a Gallup poll of 136,000 people in 139 countries.
The Philippines ranked 54th in the overall index, with a score of 36 percent. While it ranked 95th in terms of donating money to charities, and 66th in helping a stranger, the country was ranked 14th in terms of volunteering one’s time to an organization.
A GSN card, however, could boost every Filipino’s giving nature with every purchase, especially now with online shopping becoming more prevalent. Latest BSP data show total electronic payments reaching P481 billion in 2017, which includes ATM withdrawals. E-commerce transactions, meanwhile, reached P280 billion, as per research of Statistica GmbH of Hamburg,
“Let’s say the merchant cashback is 5 percent; 5 percent of P280 billion is P14 billion a year. That’s the amount that would have been channeled to charities,” Joey estimates, “if people were paying with their GSN card.”
Horace says Trureal has an online shopping portal called Trushop where 130 major merchants are affiliated, including Amazon, Walmart, Michael Kors, etc. “Let’s say, we have Lazada on our platform. You can go directly to Lazada to shop; the only thing you’re going to get is what you’re going to buy. That’s it. But if you come to Trushop Philippines and you click Lazada and you buy on Lazada, you get the product and you get a donation for your charity, and you get a tax receipt for it [at the end of the year].”
Trureal is currently laying the groundwork to set up a Philippine branch, and in other Asian countries in the next years. The company is targeting to launch its GSN card in the country by middle of 2019.