Philippines — Maya is using the Philippine National ID system, along with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, to simplify customer onboarding as financial institutions move toward greater integration with national digital identity infrastructure.
The development comes as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has proposed requiring supervised financial institutions to integrate with National ID authentication services for customer due diligence and identity verification.
“National digital infrastructure gives us a trusted foundation to build on. By combining the National ID with homegrown AI and automation, we can remove friction for customers while keeping verification robust and scalable,” said Alfred Lo, Chief Technology Officer at Maya.
“It shows how shared digital infrastructure can make financial services easier to access and safer to scale,” he continued.
Maya has integrated National ID eVerify, the Philippine Statistics Authority’s identity-verification service, into its onboarding process. Since early this year, eligible customers have been able to upgrade their accounts without photographing or uploading a physical ID, with their identity verified against the National ID system.
The use case was among those presented at the recent BSP AI Summit, where Maya was one of three companies invited to demonstrate how AI is being used in the Philippine financial sector.
“For us, the real test of AI is not how advanced the model sounds. It is whether it solves a real customer problem safely, reliably, and at scale,” said Melecio Valerio, Head of Data Governance at Maya, who presented Maya’s experience at the BSP AI Summit, themed “From Pilot to Practice: AI Adoption in the Philippine Financial Sector.”
Under the National ID-first process, eligible customers can enter their National ID number instead of uploading a physical ID and re-entering information already on record. Maya then verifies the information through National ID eVerify against government-held National ID records and completes identity verification through a video selfie.
If additional information is required, customers are asked to provide only the missing details. Those who cannot be verified through National ID eVerify can proceed with the regular ID-upload process without restarting their application.
Maya said the streamlined process does not reduce its existing safeguards. The company continues to apply applicable BSP and regulatory requirements covering know-your-customer (KYC) procedures, identity verification, screening and other required checks.
AI and automation are also used in parts of the verification process. Maya uses agentic AI — AI designed to carry out defined steps within a workflow under set controls — for its National ID-first KYC and KYC “deduplication” processes. The systems help validate information, identify possible duplicate accounts, carry out required checks and route exceptions for human review.
Maya said overall turnaround time for consumer onboarding has improved by 84%. The company said the reduction in processing time allows employees to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on exceptions, investigations and cases requiring human judgement.
The National ID onboarding process forms part of Maya’s wider use of AI across its operations. The company also uses machine learning, decision engines, behavioural scoring, anomaly detection and intelligent automation in areas including credit, fraud management, personalisation, customer care and operations.
