Lito Villanueva is the Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation and Inclusion Officer of RCBC. Concurrently, Mr. Villanueva is the Chief Digital Transformation Advisor for the Yuchengco Group of Companies, one of the oldest conglomerates in Asia. He is also the founding chairman of Fintech Alliance.ph, the Philippines' largest organization of digitally-enabled companies that generates over 90% of FinTech-initiated transactions volume in the country today.
Mr. Villanueva is the Philippines’ leading and award-winning thought leader on digital transformation and inclusive digital finance. He has over 20 years of experience in banking, telecommunications, payments, development finance, advisory, regtech, and financial technology. In the span of his career, he has covered over 30 markets in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa with his various roles in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Land Bank of the Philippines, PLDT-Smart Communications, Voyager Innovations, PayMaya, International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, and Visa. He collaborated with regulators in promoting enabling regulations towards inclusive innovations and interoperability. As a digital inclusion and transformation advocate, he institutionalized the country’s first code of conduct and code of ethics, providing a wider industry framework towards greater consumer protection in partnership with all regulators.
He has merited over 70 global and regional awards for championing innovations on financial inclusion and scaling digital initiatives for the unbanked and underserved. These accolades include being named one of the Top 100 FinTech Leaders in Asia, Mr. Fintech of the Philippines by BizNewsAsia, as Chief Innovation of the Year by the London-based The Banker, and among the Top 100 Filipinos on LinkedIn in 2021.
He released various publications including The Uncharted Beyond: The Taxonomy of FinTech in the Philippines and the award-winning three volumes of the Inclusive Digital Finance Report. He is also a member of the Inclusion Executive Committee of the Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum, Singapore-based AIBP Advisory Board, and Chairman of the South Africa-based Alliance of Digital Finance Associations. He is also the founding president of the BSP Governor Nestor A. Espenilla Jr. Institute for Growth towards National Inclusion, Transformation, and Empowerment (IGNITE).
He finished the Cambridge Intellect Leadership Programme in 2019 on Digital Transformation by Design at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School Executive Education in the United Kingdom. Earned two graduate degrees: Master of Arts in public administration with magna cum laude honors from the University of Santo Tomas (UST), and Master in National Security Administration from the National Defense College of the Philippines as a state scholar, and its youngest graduate, thus far. His undergraduate degree is in political science also in UST. He was also the first two-term elected president of the UST AB Student Council during his college years.