Digital transformation has never been more necessary to daily life than it is today. Since the pandemic occurred, businesses have continued to migrate to online platforms, highlighting the ever-growing need for automated information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. For businesses to succeed in this current environment, they need to invest in ICT that will improve communication, privacy and security, and overall connectivity.
Software developers in particular come face to face with new challenges, the most pressing of which is the growing demand for the products they create. Globe Business rises to this challenge by devising suitable solutions that make workflow not only more efficient, but also safer for developers and users who access the programs they create.
Since the pandemic has only accelerated the speed with which organizations are adopting new technologies, the shortcomings of traditional internet connections have come to the forefront. Globe Business addresses these worries through direct, secure connections for busy offices.
“Dedicated connectivity or Direct Internet is a game-changer for growing businesses. Whether you’re in tech, healthcare, education, retail, finance, etc., connectivity is really now a necessity. Most especially for tech companies and software developers who use and develop their own platforms and systems, having a dedicated bandwidth is a top business need,” discusses Nikki Ebrada, Infocomm Marketing Lead of Globe Business MSME Group, during the talk “Reducing Latency For SaaS Through Connectivity and Automation” at the online SOFTCON.ph 2021: RESURGENCE attended by leaders and innovators in the software development industry.
Direct Internet eliminates latency typically experienced in wired broadband connections. Instead of sharing a pipe with other businesses accessing information online, Direct Internet gives a team its own dedicated internet connection that lets users fully utilize their subscribed bandwidth.
Direct Internet eases the pain points software developers encounter with insufficient connections, from the inability to transfer high volumes of data to having multiple users on the internet simultaneously.
Along with reliable and dedicated connectivity, software developers also need efficient and automated methods of responding to business needs as employees continue to work from home. Application programming interfaces, or APIs, enable them to keep businesses connected to both employee and consumer, with no fuss.
These are just a few of the pay-per-use APIs from Globe Labs that developers can use to streamline business interactions.
Globe Labs’ Business Development Manager, Diego Garcia, talked about the business problems solved by automation through Globe Labs APIs at SOFTCON.ph: “Electricity forever changed the way businesses work, and connectivity is the electricity of today. If employees in a remote working environment need connectivity wherever they are, how do we provide this to them? How do we allow businesses to provide for their employees and customers?”
One application of Globe Labs APIs is Load Up, a platform that lets businesses disburse Globe/TM load to thousands of recipients. Globe also eases communication using its own Interactive Voice Engagement Solution (IVES) and M360 to disseminate information and surveys to customers and perform welfare checks on and give announcements to teams.
Globe understands that an organization is never truly secure unless every member of the organization has a good grasp of data privacy. This is why Globe Business offers ADPRIMAS, or Automated Data Privacy Management Solution, which educates employees on principles of data privacy through reports and training materials.
“It assesses the level of competence of everyone, from the management to the security guard because there’s got to be a meeting of the minds between the technical people and the guys who are going to use it. You may be talking from different aspects as far as privacy is concerned. You must be on the same wavelength and understanding,” discussed founding chairman Titus Manuel of the National Association of Data Protection Officers of the Philippines at the 2021 SOFTCON.ph.
ADPRIMAS supports the Data Privacy Team and Human Resources Department through timely information and assistance. The data provided allows the Team and Department to address points for Privacy Compliance and Management improvements. This is made possible through summary reports of assessment results and a marketplace of eLearning Courses (Consultant/Instructor Assisted). They are vital for the needed privacy competence upgrade for every employee in the institution.
Globe Business also boasts of resources to support its partners as they use Globe Business ICT solutions, first through their training-as-a-service (TRaaS) offer. The group also has Globe Business Academy that gives users access to business tools, hacks, and expert advice; and, finally, an exclusive program named Upstart, which rewards MSMEs with exclusive perks and benefits.
When strong connectivity, automation tools, sufficient data privacy knowledge, and access to knowledge and training work hand in hand, businesses are in the best position to thrive amidst rapidly evolving times. Globe Business provides all these for software developers to support organizations in digital adoption.
Learn more about Globe Business’ solutions for software developers and other innovations here: glbe.co/infocomm.
The pandemic changed our outlook almost overnight. Pre-lockdowns, Filipinos were cautious adopters of e-commerce, but now we embrace it and see it as essential. Resilience and compassionate listening have been key for many Filipino entrepreneurs to adapt to the times. One of them is Canlaon Mart, a diversified retail business in Canlaon City, Negros Oriental. Focusing on their customers’ needs, they found ways to adjust their offers and operations, partnering with Globe Business to help them pivot digitally in the new normal.
Through this mindset, they’ve grown from being a food and beverages retailer and wholesaler and ventured into fuel, hardware, farming, exclusive dealerships with San Miguel Beer, Tanduay, and Coca-Cola, and even financial services like Perahub for money remittance and BDO Cash Agad for ATM Cash withdrawals. “All of our ventures are driven by what the market needs,” says owner Jeff Rey C. Jalandoni. Adapting digital innovations with Globe Business’ help is just another way they’re leaning into what their customers are looking for.
Being an essential service provider, Canlaon Mart was saved from shutdowns during ECQ. However, food supply dwindled due to manufacturing disruptions, travel restrictions, and periodical liquor bans. Demand for fuel dipped when people stayed home.
“As a precautionary move, we were obliged to centralize operations to our main branch to implement health protocols and consolidate manpower. We increased inventory of goods experiencing supply disruption. We changed how we handle transactions like ordering, payment, and banking from face-to-face to online, minimizing travel as our bank is 40 km away. We were increasingly dependent on internet connectivity to adapt to the pandemic.”
Since their customers needed internet too, they partnered with Globe and TM to provide prepaid load in the mountainous areas unreached by cell towers or motorcycles. The initiative is called Piso Wifi, powered by P2P Wireless Networking, and it answers the “need for connectivity that evolved from optional to essential” at an affordable price.
For Jalandoni, “Globe Business is a trusted technology partner” with customizable services and a supportive team that propped up his business’ diversification pursuits. As a Direct Internet subscriber, Canlaon Mart enjoys a dedicated, uninterrupted connection with equal upload and download speeds, serving as a “lifeline for the network in mountainous communities and the entire business.” Remote monitoring and improved security is also made possible by Globe’s Managed CCTV, allowing them to focus on their core business.
Inevitably, technology will advance and impact everyone in the coming years. Let Globe Business be your partner in finding the best digital solutions — from mobile internet to cybersecurity — for greater success.
Staying healthy becomes a real priority for everyone as we claw against COVID-19 and its socio-economic repercussions. As medical frontliners defend our forts within the walls of hospitals and clinics, safeguarding patients’ and medical workers’ healths through social distancing is key to meet today’s demands and needs. This is why many clinics nationwide expanded to teleconsultation and home service. Among them is the Keralty Group, a trusted healthcare provider since 1954 that began in Spain and expanded to Latin America, United States, and Asia — starting with the Philippines in 2016. Their nine strategically located facilities like Megaclinic (Mandaluyong), TopHealth (Manila), and MetroSanitas Festival (Muntinlupa) have one goal: provide world-class Multi-Specialty, Ambulatory Surgical clinics in the country.
When the virus started to wreak havoc and we knew little about how it was transmitted, the biggest challenge was “ensuring patient and staff safety, so we made sure proper infection control is implemented,” according to Keralty Clinics Philippines’ Business Development Director Philip Neri Estocada. Walk-in services started picking up post ECQ, but even more so for their online and telemed services that they supplemented their operations with technology and reliable connectivity.
As a healthcare facility, patient records had to be accessible but confidential. For that, Keralty relies on Globe Business, their “partner in innovation,” says Estocada.
With Globe Business’ Direct Internet, Keralty clinics experience a dedicated bandwidth with equal speeds for file uploads and downloads. There will be no more long waits for retrieving files or routing paperwork. Patients and doctors have more time to talk, the former feeling more cared for, and the latter happy to have served better, both secured without sacrificing their health.
Google Workspace also enables Keralty to update and see files on-the-go. Teleconsultations can run seamlessly over Google Meet, vital health indicators quickly recorded in Google Sheets, then securely filed in Google Drive. Simple yet substantial, these solutions empower practitioners to serve more Filipinos with equal professional care as in-clinic.
Keralty Group will keep expanding, especially in underserved areas in the Philippines. Globe Business will be by its side, continually developing cell sites and digital solutions. Stay up to date with Globe Business here.
Because of the pandemic, all the usual ways we do business is suddenly not enough.
In your own company, you have perhaps turned to new online technology or enhanced the ones you had in place before the pandemic struck.
Alongside online portals or selling platforms, solutions like Zoom to conduct online meetings and classes, or customer relationship management (CRM) software, your business has equipped itself with a high-end internet connection, possibly from multiple providers as back-up.
As it is beginning to look like 2021 will bring more of the same, you need to arm your business with an internet connection that can handle all of the online tools you use to stay competitive and thrive.
The best type of connectivity for you is Direct Internet, already being enjoyed by other progressive companies in the country.
Direct Internet is connectivity that is not available to residential users.
It’s different from the wired broadband you know as it connects only your business to the heart of your internet service provider’s network. You won’t be sharing bandwidth with any other accounts in the vicinity.
Interested to learn more? Here are the game-changing benefits of this product:
Because Direct Internet lets you own your bandwidth, which guarantees your internet speed with no downtime, there’s less need to have more than one internet provider. With the same cost of maintaining multiple broadband lines that you share with other residential or businesses in your area, you can get a more reliable connection with just one.
Along with that dedicated connection, Direct Internet also provides your business with equal upload and download speeds.
What does this mean? Even if many of you are engaged in a video conference, downloading a huge file will not lower the quality of your call. You can upload large amounts of data just as fast as well. That’s an important feature for easy collaboration with your colleagues and clients.
You essentially bypass the shared speed limits provided to other users and you create a less congested pathway for your uploads and downloads.
When your business has a network connection dedicated to it, there is less of a delay in transmitting data. That translates to video calls and conferences proceeding without a hitch. That also means continuous high-quality streaming, no dropped connections, and no app timeouts.
You can finally say goodbye to delays caused by slow internet speeds.
Here’s something you may not know. When you sign a contract for a broadband connection, the maximum bandwidth you get from that is not going to be changing over the duration of the contract. If your business experiences immense growth, you are going to find yourself stuck with a network connection that may not be able to handle the load.
A direct internet account is built differently. If you find that the maximum bandwidth given to you is not enough, you can easily have it raised up to match the demand. If you need a 1GB speed rather than the 100MB you started out with, a direct internet account can give that to you easily.
Somewhere down the line, you might encounter problems with your network connection. While getting problems resolved with a broadband connection may take some time, that is not the case with a direct internet account.
Contracts for direct internet accounts will have clauses in them that require the service provider to fix the problem within a certain number of hours. Those hours can mean life or death for a growing business like yours.
Before the COVID-19, safeguarding a business was a more direct affair — simply have security over at your physical location. But as businesses move online, there are more threats to deal with that one may not have prepared for.
A direct internet account is a big help when it comes to this as it allows businesses to have as many static IP addresses as it requires. How does this help out? Companies can use a static IP address to identify and authenticate data as well as keep their own networks secure.
Connectivity and digitized processes are big success factors in businesses today, and you can’t afford to have these crippled by a network connection that can’t keep up. Direct Internet may be higher priced than alternatives like broadband, but with the promises it can definitely deliver, it’s an investment you need. It safeguards your systems’ smooth operations, customer interactions, and employees’ productivity.
Want to know more about Globe myBusiness Direct Internet? Schedule a consultation with us now!
The financial service sector is going through a huge shift. Financial technologies or Fintechs have stolen the scene with their advanced services. Rural banks and smaller financial institutions need to adapt if they want to keep up with the competition.
Luckily, financial services technology is now far more accessible to smaller players. There are plenty of solutions in the market that make it possible for you to digitize in the next three years, or even in the next months.
Here are five of the latest technology trends for financial services in 2020 and beyond:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from a buzzword to just another part of our daily lives. And this is just in the course of a few years. Banks and Fintechs have been using the technology to power intelligent voice assistants or provide customers with personalized experiences. But one of the simplest applications of AI (and with most impact) is its ability to automate tasks, like chatbots.
Chatbots are revolutionizing customer service by making it easier, cheaper, and more accessible to users. Instead of being on hold for who knows how long, users can simply “talk” to a chatbot to get all their questions answered.
Most major banks and financial institutions have e-banking capabilities or a mobile banking application — and with good reason too. 69.2% of the Philippine population uses a mobile phone. They do anything from browsing the internet to shop with it. While mobile banking penetration is still low at 28%, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is positive about the benefits of going cashless. BSP is implementing various services to promote going digital.
BSP also believes that 20% of local transactions will be digital by 2020. This means that banks and financial institutions that have not yet digitized their services need to catch up if they want to stay competitive in the future.
While the costs and time needed to create an app depend on the size and complexity of the project, it’s possible to implement one within the next six months. It can take anywhere from 20 to 30 weeks. This makes it a relatively short-term endeavor with huge future payoffs.
With the rise of mobile banking, more financial institutions have also been investing in identity authentication technologies. This protects sensitive user information. The most popular one is one-time-passwords (OTPs). However, pro fraudsters have quickly found ways to intercept OTPs and scam unknowing customers.
There are banks and financial institutions that have turned to biometric technologies. A real-time face or fingerprint scan is far more secure than a typical username and password setup. This is because it depends on a person’s unique features that can’t be duplicated. Not to mention it saves customers from having to remember complex passwords.
Ensuring the cybersecurity of personal information is important to maintain digital services. Without it, you would quickly lose the trust and loyalty of your customers. So these measures should be implemented alongside any mobile banking or e-banking plans.
Once you go digital, all the information you collect needs to go somewhere. Instead of investing in or customizing data lake stores, more banks are turning to cloud computing.
As the name suggests, cloud computing is a technology for storing and analyzing data. There are a number of service providers in the market that sell it with pay-as-you-go pricing options. That means you only need to pay for the services you actually use. Not only will this give you the flexibility of today’s Fintechs, but it will also help control costs.
Cloud computing solutions should be easy to implement as all the integration is done by the service provider.
Blockchain came into the scene as the digital ledger that made cryptocurrency possible. But its business applications didn’t stop there. Blockchain is also changing the way monetary transactions are recorded.
Instead of the usual excel sheet, manual logging, and verifying processes, all transactions are updated and confirmed in real-time. These are stored in the blockchain in an unchangeable manner. Not only does this reduce paperwork, but it also provides the highest level of transparency and security. It reduces the risk of error and fraud. Plus, it’s far cheaper to maintain as it removes an entire layer of verification.
The downside of blockchain is it needs complete digitalization of operations (both from the bank and its stakeholders) in order to work.
While the financial services sector has generally been slow when it comes to keeping up with the latest technologies, it isn’t too late yet. Things like AI, blockchain, and cloud computing are no longer exclusive to the big guns with deep pockets. There are now more affordable and accessible solutions in the market for everyone. Globe myBusiness, for example, offers cloud-based and mobility solutions to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Plus, governing institutions like the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) are also taking steps to give incentives for digitalizing financial services.
According to Rappler, BSP is one of the most progressive regulators when it comes to promoting cashless transactions. So it wouldn’t be difficult for you to be BSP-compliant. These are some of the things that the central bank has allowed:
As the financial sector continues to shift, you can ready your financial business for the evolution by following these trends.
Learn more about Globe myBusiness solutions that will modernize your financial institution. Find out more here.
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