by Joel Pinaroc, Correspondent
Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Amazon.com, bared that the technology giant will continue to support programs on sustainability, particularly for developing countries in the Southeast Asian region, including the Philippines.
Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Amazon.com
Vogels recently sat down with Fintechnewsph.com to discuss further some key areas that Amazon will continue to support. The executive further highlighted the role of Amazon in providing technology — via its technology arm Amazon Web Services or AWS — to enable companies to initiate these sustainability programs.
Here are other key highlights of the interview:
On financial sustainability and inclusivity
Vogels particularly cited leading mobile wallet firm GCash on making financial services available to as many Filipinos as possible.
“If you look at the motivation aspect — a part of the motivation behind GCash for example, is the huge number of ‘unbanked’ Filipinos,” Vogels said.
“And so, we’re giving a solution for that, not necessarily giving a bank solution but giving an easy intermediary with a wallet and things like that,” he added.
Vogels further stated it may seem like a commercial operation, “but at the same time, it also solves a difficult problem. You know, because if you don’t have access to a bank, everything becomes hard.”
In Indonesia, for instance, Vogels cited a company that helps the country’s agricultural sector avail of financial services.
“Another company is not necessarily here in the Philippines, but it’s in the region if I would call Asia a region. A company called Hara in Jakarta, for example, gives identity to smallholder farmers, manages their plots of land, and manages the yield,” Vogels said.
“So, these farmers no longer have to go to a loan shark. They can go to a bank. Loan sharks for their seeds will cost them 40% interest and so, half of their crop is already gone before they can even start harvesting. And banks are extremely interested in this kind of information because these microloans have 100% repayment,” he explained.
Vogels added: “Interestingly enough is that the founders of that company are all children of smallholder farmers themselves. So, they are very much aware of the kind of problems that real people encounter in their daily lives. They are the tech-savvy, younger generation.”
On healthcare and building a sustainable business
“The same goes in areas such as healthcare and others, where I think there are bigger problems that need to be solved. And interesting enough, especially here in the Philippines, I find that entrepreneurs here are not necessarily all looking at becoming the next unicorn to build the next billion-dollar business,” Vogels said, citing that these entrepreneurs “are interested in building a sustainable business, a business that they can actually run for the coming 20 or 30 years and have a good life in.”
“As such, I think especially those kind of entrepreneurs that will take a careful approach to build a sustainable business, AWS, the cloud computing division of Amazon, is really keen on supporting them,” Vogels said.
“And we have special programs in place to help them out, there’s a program called Activate, for example, where we, I think at this moment, we give them $10,000 in credits that they can use on AWS, and we give them business support and development support and things like that.”
On addressing the needs of the ‘unmapped’
Further, Vogels also cited the needs of the “unmapped,” particularly for archipelagos such as the Philippines.
“Now, another issue here (in the Philippines), for example, is the unmapped.”
Vogels said “unmapped” means that a very large part of the Philippines does not appear on a commercial map like Google Maps or Apple Maps.
“Why not? Because these areas are not commercially interesting. At the same time, the Philippines is a typhoon alley with a lot of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and things like that,” the executive further explained.
“So, to support large parts of the country, for example, by the Red Cross or ambulances and things like that, they can’t rely on maps because the areas are not mapped. And so, there’s the OpenStreetMap Foundation together with the humanitarian OpenStreetMaps. For example, we have a program here in place in the Philippines that maps areas or creates a map of the areas that are not mapped by commercial companies.”
Vogels added: “So you go into smaller towns and places like that, people won’t know if there’s an earthquake or a typhoon, which is the biggest building that is sturdiest and we should go to when there is an earthquake, for example.”
“Or they just don’t know where the roads are. The ambulances don’t know where to drive and how to get to places. So, the OpenStreetMap and the humanitarian OpenStreetMap Foundation have all sorts of volunteers that go around with apps and basically “map” places. They also look at how sturdy the buildings are and things like that.”
“And we at AWS support them with technology because we believe those are very important parts. Now, those, I think, are what I would call technology used for good purposes,” Vogels said.