JuanHand, the Philippine subsidiary of NYSE-listed, Shanghai-based FinVolution Group, hopes to transform underserved borrowers into creditworthy bank clients through its “nano cash lending” model. The company’s ambitious plan could mark a significant step toward improving financial inclusion in a country where nearly half the adult population remains outside the formal banking system.
“We’re doing what I call nano cash lending – it’s such a small ticket size, it’s not even micro,” said Francis ‘CoCo’ Mauricio, president and CEO of JuanHand. The company processes between 80,000 and 100,000 transactions daily, each sized between $50 and $1,000, with an average loan of just $65 for a typical 65-day term.
For many Filipinos, these small loans represent their first entry into formal financial services. “The only other access to money these people have is through a loan shark, or by borrowing from family or friends,” Mauricio told DigFin. “This is financial assistance to the invisibles, the ones with no credit history, the ones who can’t submit a document.”
This explains the company’s humorous name, which is pronounced like ‘One Hand’.
According to World Bank data cited by Mauricio, approximately 27 to 30 percent of adult Filipinos lack a bank account or access to credit, with the total underserved population likely approaching 45 percent. This aligns with findings from a World Bank survey published in 2015, which found that while about 20 million Filipino adults reported saving money, only 10 million had bank accounts.
Graduation day
JuanHand’s most innovative initiative is its plan to ‘graduate’ reliable borrowers to traditional banking relationships. “Through us they can develop a credit history, gain access to more financial services, get access to more money, on better terms. Ultimately many of these people can be bankable,” Mauricio said.
The company has established criteria based on borrowers’ credit history and estimated long-term value to determine when they might be ready for this transition. “We know the borrowers’ credit history, so we will increase the loan sizes as they do repeat business with us. We compute their long-term value and estimate when they might be ready to graduate to a bank,” explained Mauricio.
While the formal target for producing the first graduates is the first half of 2026, Mauricio expressed hope that some borrowers might be ready by the end of 2025. The minimum threshold for most bank loans is $3,000-$4,000, substantially higher than JuanHand’s maximum limit of $1,000.
Banking partnerships
JuanHand has secured partnerships with two digital banks, including MayaBank. It expects to sign two more institutions later this year. (These deals are signed with JuanHand’s locally incorporated holding company, WeFund Lending Corporation.)
The company offers two types of bank relationships: wholesale funding for its loan book, and loan channeling, in which JuanHand acquires and screens potential customers for banks through API integration.
“Commercial banks want to partner with us because it helps them fulfill their own mandates from the central bank to address financial inclusion,” Mauricio noted. The easiest way is to lend to a commingled pool of customers, but those with savvy tech capabilities can pick and choose individual borrowers – such as what MayaBank has agreed.
AI-powered lending
Behind JuanHand’s operations is FinVolution’s sophisticated artificial intelligence engine, developed in Shanghai.
This is not a recent development but a longstanding evolution: FinVolution is the new name for PPDAI, one of China’s first peer-to-peer lending platforms. In the 2010s, digital P2P lenders exploded throughout China, some of them criminal, and the government cracked down on the sector. PPDAI, which had been the first to be licensed in China as a digital lending platform, pivoted to working wholesale with banks and changed its name.
With the change in business model came evolutions in the technology that FinVolution has developed.
Chen Lei, FinVolution’s vice president and head of big data and AI, says the company began by using alternative data for credit scoring, and expanded this to include deep learning to analyze unstructured data. Today almost all of the credit-assessment and risk-management processes are automated, except for fraud detection, although that too is now mostly digitized.
“We use AI now for efficiency and better financial decisions: risk management, customer acquisition, collections,” Lei told DigFin. “Our fraud detection is already at 99% effectiveness. We look at the individual, their devices, who they’re connected to, how they behave in our app.”
Recently, FinVolution has enhanced its AI capabilities with the launch of a proprietary Large Language Model called ‘Rice Seeds’, designed to optimize every stage of the credit lifecycle including risk assessment, fraud detection, and customer interactions.
Made in China
Honed in China, FinVolution is now deploying it to serve customers in other markets, starting in Southeast Asia.
And Chinese tech is a competitive advantage. “On the front end, we have localized the experience, but the AI, the framework, the engine, is all developed in Shanghai,” said Mauricio. “This tech gives us an advantage that local competitors can’t match. China machine learning has so many data points, the FinVolution algo engine is smooth and well oiled. I’d say local AI talent is 3 to 5 years behind.”
For FinVolution, which has a market cap of approximately $2.11 billion as of May 8, 2025, the Philippines represents part of a broader international expansion strategy that began in 2018. Chen Lei says the company’s goal is to generate 50% of revenues from international markets by 2030, with operations now spanning Indonesia, Vietnam, and Pakistan in addition to the Philippines.
Meanwhile, as FinVolution continues to refine its AI capabilities, JuanHand is positioning itself to expand beyond its current focus on sub-prime borrowers. “Right now we’re catering to sub-prime borrowers, but we’re building products that will be able to serve semi-prime, and eventually prime borrowers,” Mauricio said.
The company’s graduation program, if successful, could provide a template for how fintech firms can serve as a bridge between the unbanked and traditional financial institutions, potentially transforming the financial landscape in the Philippines and other markets with large underserved populations.
For the millions of Filipinos who have relied on informal lending networks or gone without credit entirely, the prospect of establishing a formal financial identity through companies like JuanHand represents not just access to more favorable loan terms, but potentially a step toward full participation in the financial system.
