Gotianun-led Filinvest Group—one of the Philippines’ largest conglomerates—has partnered with Amazon and its global industry experts to accelerate digital transformation across the Filinvest ecosystem by seeding Amazon’s “learn and be curious" culture to various teams. As the world recovers from the pandemic and accelerates towards economic growth, Filinvest’s President and CEO Josephine Gotianun-Yap remains confident and steadfast in driving the business forward.
“Today, Filinvest envisions its varied businesses in sectors such as real estate, hospitality, and banking and finance to embrace a digital future. This vision requires everyone in the organization to innovate and find new ways of doing things to cater to the increased expectations of customers.”
The group believes that this is an essential step in ensuring that its people and businesses can empower more and more Filipinos to achieve their dreams in the future. "We are inspired by the Day 1 mentality at Amazon, their customer obsession, as well as their ability to maintain a long-term focus, and pursue bold innovation," says Xavier Marzan, Managing Director and CEO of F(DEV), Filinvest Group’s digital innovation and venture arm. "The recent global pandemic has forced all organizations to rethink the way that they do things as well as prepare for an accelerated digital future. To us, this means creating more digital-based experiences for customers and being able to launch new digital offerings. What better way to drive all these than through an innovation-led culture, which is at the core of Amazon.", Marzan added.
As part of the collaboration, Amazon’s AWS unit will work with Filinvest business teams to leverage Amazon's Working Backwards methodology, with the aim of rapidly building out and deploying customer-centric digital solutions. AWS innovation experts will also connect these business teams to its digital innovation specialists and enterprise strategists to provide cutting-edge industry knowledge from different markets to support the conglomerate’s digital growth initiatives.
Moreover, AWS will support Filinvest’s efforts with its AWS Activate program including providing mentorship to Filinvest business teams, creating sandboxes to speed up experimentation, and providing go-to-market support to the tech startups within the conglomerate’s portfolio. The partnership is part of Filinvest’s broader Filinvent.io program was launched last year by F(DEV) and is geared towards accelerating the development of new digital-based capabilities, products, and businesses across the group’s subsidiaries.
Conor McNamara, Managing Director of AWS ASEAN expressed excitement towards the collaboration, stating that “AWS has been at the forefront of helping organizations of all sizes across the globe with their digital transformation journeys. We’re very excited about our collaboration with Filinvest Group and F(DEV). It presents an opportunity to combine both our deep expertise in technology and digital business models to support the growth objectives of the Filinvest conglomerate across its diverse businesses ranging from real estate, retail, financial services to the power, and infrastructure.”
