Maya has wired the Philippine National ID directly into its sign-up process and paired it with artificial intelligence, and the result is an 84% cut in how long consumer onboarding takes. The fintech firm announced the milestone on August 24 after presenting the system at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) AI Summit, where it was one of only three companies invited to show how AI is used in Philippine finance.
How the National ID flow works
Maya has integrated National ID eVerify, the identity-verification service of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), into its know-your-customer (KYC) process. KYC is the check that banks and e-wallets must run to confirm who a customer really is.
Instead of photographing a physical ID card and typing in personal details, eligible customers can now:
- Enter their National ID number
- Complete a short video selfie
- Let the system match their information against official National ID records
If some data is incomplete, the system asks only for the missing details. Customers who cannot be verified through eVerify can switch to the regular upload-an-ID route without restarting their application, according to Newsbytes.PH.
Agentic AI, with humans still in the loop
Behind the scenes, Maya uses what it calls agentic AI — software agents that carry out defined steps in a workflow within set controls, rather than a chatbot that simply answers questions. These agents validate customer information, hunt for possible duplicate accounts, run the required compliance checks, and pass anything unusual to a human reviewer.
The deduplication piece matters as much as the speed. Duplicate and fake accounts are a common vector for scams and money mules in Philippine e-wallets, and matching new sign-ups against verified National ID records makes it substantially harder to open multiple accounts under invented identities. Maya says the design keeps humans responsible for exceptions: the AI routes unclear cases to a reviewer instead of deciding them on its own.
Maya chief technology officer Alfred Lo said national digital infrastructure gives the company "a trusted foundation to build on," and that combining the National ID with AI and automation removes friction for customers. Melecio Valerio, Maya's head of data governance, put the bar plainly: the real test of AI is whether it solves a real customer problem safely, reliably, and at scale.
The same AI-first strategy already covers Maya's credit scoring, fraud detection, personalization, and customer support systems.
Why the BSP is watching closely
The timing is not accidental. The BSP has proposed a rule that would require banks and e-money issuers — including GCash and Maya — to plug into the National ID's authentication services for customer due diligence and identity verification. Maya's rollout effectively previews what that regulation would look like in practice: faster sign-ups for consumers, fewer fake or duplicate accounts for platforms, and a bigger role for the PSA's eVerify rails across Philippine finance.
It also explains the venue. The BSP summit's theme — "From Pilot to Practice: AI Adoption in the Philippine Financial Sector" — is a signal from the regulator that it wants working AI deployments with governance attached, not experiments. Presenting a production KYC system built on government identity rails, with measurable results and human oversight, is exactly the kind of case study the central bank was asking for.
For Filipino users, the practical payoff is simple. Account upgrades that used to mean blurry ID photos and manual data entry can now finish in a fraction of the time — and the same identity checks that slow down first-time e-wallet users become largely invisible. With scam and mule accounts a persistent problem in local fintech, identity checks anchored on government records also raise the cost of faking an identity.
One caveat: the 84% figure is Maya's own measurement of its onboarding turnaround, and the company has not said how many customers have gone through the new National ID-first flow so far. What is verifiable today is the mechanism — PSA eVerify is live inside Maya's app, and if you already hold a National ID, the number-plus-selfie route is the fastest way to get a fully verified account.
