Manila, Philippines – Financial platform Jia has partnered with Philippine-based Netbank to expand lending access for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), marking the first time the company has opened its lending infrastructure to another financial institution.
Under the partnership, Netbank, which is regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, has provided Jia with a US$2 million credit facility. The funding, Jia’s first institutional credit facility in the Philippines, will be used to finance working capital loans for up to 500 SMEs over the next 12 months.
The collaboration also introduces Jia Accounts, a business banking product designed for Philippine SMEs. The product allows borrowers to receive loan proceeds and manage repayments through a regulated banking platform powered by Netbank.
The partnership represents a new phase in Jia’s business strategy as it expands from operating as a lender to offering its lending infrastructure to other financial institutions.
According to Jia, it has originated more than US$20 million in SME loans in the Philippines since 2022. The company said it has maintained a non-performing loan rate below 3% with no write-offs during that period, compared with an industry average of 10% to 15%. Jia said its lending has primarily focused on retailers, distributors, and inventory-driven businesses that have established order flows and repayment histories but may not meet conventional credit assessment criteria.
The company’s lending platform is built around Ossicone, its proprietary artificial intelligence-powered underwriting engine. Jia said the platform analyses business documents such as purchase orders, supplier invoices, and delivery receipts to generate credit decisions in under 30 minutes with an accuracy rate of 97%.
Jia said it has developed its own dataset based on Philippine SME financial documents over the past three years, which it uses to train its underwriting models. With the launch of Jia Accounts, the company said real-time cash flow data from customers will be integrated into the platform to further improve its underwriting capabilities.
The company also said it is making its infrastructure available to banks, cooperatives, and lending companies through application programming interfaces (APIs) and white-label offerings. These services enable financial institutions to deploy Jia’s accounts, underwriting tools, and capital connectivity under their own brands without building new infrastructure. Netbank is the first institution to adopt the platform.
“Every emerging market has thousands of businesses growing fast, paying on time, and waiting for a bank that can see them clearly,” said Zach Marks, CEO of Jia. “We spent three years building the infrastructure to do that and proving it on our own balance sheet. Now we’re opening it to other institutions, because the opportunity is too large for any one lender to capture alone.”
“There is no public dataset for Philippine SME financial documents. That’s the moat,” said Krizanne Ty, President and Country Head at Jia Philippines. “Every loan has sharpened Ossicone’s accuracy, and now that businesses bank with Jia, their live cashflow feeds directly into the models — making them better for every SME on our book and every institution building on our platform.”
