Lito Villanueva
Managing Director, FINTQnologies Corp.
Chairman, FinTechAlliance.ph
Founder & Lead Convenor, KasamaKA
Lito Villanueva started the FinTech business for the PLDT Group. He pioneered the award-winning and country’s largest digital lending platform service called Lendr. It was recently named as the Consumer Finance Product of the Year by the Asian Banker. He has received over 30 global and regional accolades in three years including being recognized as one of the Top 100 Asian FinTech leaders, the first and only Filipino in the list. He is also the chairman of the FinTechAlliance.ph, an industry group amongst FinTech players in the country recognized by the BSP, and Founder and Lead Convenor of KasamaKA, a grassroots-based social advocacy and national movement for inclusive growth. KasamaKA recently bagged a Gold Anvil Award for creatively promoting financial inclusion.
He champions the accelerated digitalization of various financial services including but not limited to credit, insurance, investments, savings, pension, eKYC, alternative credit scoring, and digital cloud-based banking. He focuses on key sectors such as agriculture, mSMEs, unbanked and underserved, overseas Filipinos and cooperatives, among others. He recently introduced the Accelerated Growth and Rural Inclusion or AGRI as the country’s first farm-to-marketplace digital agricultural end-to-end value chain platform connecting producers to consumers.
He started his career as senior research associate and associate editor at Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Philippines. Prior to joining the PLDT Group, he was with Visa and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group. He has covered over 35 various markets in Latin America, Asia, Middle East and North Africa in his previous roles.
He earned two post-graduate degrees in public administration graduating magna cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas, and in national security administration at the National Defense College of the Philippines. He is happily married with six children.