| Photo by Giovanni Gigliardi on Unsplash
The government’s refusal to transfer OFBank to overseas Filipinos is not caution — it is capture.
Something is revealing in the architecture of broken promises. The Overseas Filipino Bank was born with the right name and the wrong ownership. Created by executive fiat in 2017 under President Duterte’s Executive Order 44, it was marketed as the financial home of the bagong bayani — the new heroes, the more than ten million pesos Filipinos scattered across 140 countries whose remittances now constitute a structural pillar of the Philippine economy. The Philippines remittances market stood at USD 41.21 billion in 2025 and is one of the world’s fourth-largest remittance corridors, supporting roughly 8.3 percent of the national GDP. The people who generate that wealth do not own the bank created in their name. That anomaly should disturb anyone who believes the state owes its diaspora more than rhetoric.
The proposition is not complicated. OFBank should be capitalized through the General Appropriations Act and its shares transferred, progressively and transparently, to overseas Filipinos themselves — through a mutualization framework in which depositors and stakeholders become co-owners. OFBank already earns income and holds capital as a government bank; the Filipino diaspora already provides the deposit base. Mutualization does not require inventing a new market; it only redistributes ownership and governance so that the people who fund the bank also own it. The viability case is airtight. What is missing is political will, and that absence is not accidental.
The Convenient Inertia of the State
The government’s hesitation to act on this transition has followed a familiar pattern: benign-sounding delay dressed in the language of process. Instead of capitalizing OFBank as a genuinely independent institution, the bureaucracy has drifted toward the opposite direction. Rumors swirled of a David and Goliath merger between LandBank — the second-largest bank in the Philippines by assets — and the upstart OFBank, the country’s first digital bank. The grapevine revealed an initial inquiry by the Governance Commission for GOCCs addressed to the Department of Migrant Workers, setting in motion designs on OFBank that overseas Filipinos could only hope were benevolent.
Merger with LandBank would be the quietest form of erasure. OFBank would be absorbed, its brand perhaps retained as a product line, its mandate dissolved into the priorities of an institution whose board is chaired by the Secretary of Finance and whose shareholders consist exclusively of the Republic of the Philippines. LandBank is 100 percent owned by the national government, with no representation for the overseas Filipinos it ostensibly serves. Swallowing OFBank into this structure does not expand the bank — it converts it from a potential instrument of diaspora empowerment into a government distribution window for remittance collection.
While the creation of OFBank was a significant step forward, the ownership structure enshrined in Executive Order 44 left a bitter taste in the mouths of the intended beneficiaries. The bank has the greatest potential to uplift the welfare of overseas Filipinos and the most practical opportunity to bridge the divide between OFWs and those who have attained permanent residency or citizenship abroad — but it has not delivered on that promise.
Why the GAA Matters
The mechanics of the proposed transition are important because critics will misrepresent them. Capitalizing OFBank through the General Appropriations Act is not a subsidy to a privileged class. It is the state honoring a pre-existing obligation to fund the bank that EO 44 mandated be adequately capitalized. Given the runaway funding of agricultural loan condonation at around ₱58 billion, and other ayuda programs disbursed through conditional transfers totaling ₱250 billion, the lack of support for the immediate transition of control and ownership of OFBank to overseas Filipinos presents a real contradiction. The government allocates funds to programs that keep beneficiaries dependent and atomized. It hesitates precisely when ownership — and therefore power — is on the table.
GAA capitalization would provide OFBank with the minimum equity base to operate as a genuinely independent digital bank, attracting deposits from the diaspora at lower cost, extending credit to OFWs at fairer rates, and eventually generating returns that flow back not to Treasury but to its co-owner members. It is not a radical idea. Credit unions, mutual savings banks, and cooperative financial institutions exist across the developed and developing world on exactly this model.
“The OFWs who clean the apartments of the Gulf, nurse the patients of London and Riyadh, man the vessels crossing the Pacific, and wire home the billions that keep this economy breathing — they are not asking for charity. They are asking for what was promised: a bank of their own.”
The Real Resistance: Follow the Fees
Here, we should speak plainly about what the government’s hesitation actually protects. Bank transfers led the Philippine remittances market in 2024 with a 47.23 percent share, and digital wallets are projected to grow at a 12.68 percent CAGR from 2025 to 2030. It is an enormous commercial territory. BDO, Bank of the Philippine Islands, and Metrobank have historically held the top positions in the international remittance market. These are the institutions that earn fees on every dollar sent home by an OFW through their corridors — fees that a well-capitalized, OFW-owned OFBank would systematically undercut.
In October 2025, BPI launched BPI Remit, offering free direct fund transfers from the United States for amounts above USD 250, explicitly targeting approximately 4.6 million Filipinos in America. It is not philanthropy. It is a pre-emptive competitive response to the threat that a properly capitalized OFBank would represent — a bank with no profit motive on remittance fees because its owners are the remitters themselves. BDO, Metrobank, and the broader Philippine Bankers Association have every incentive to ensure that OFBank remains undercapitalized, subsidiary, and dependent on LandBank’s infrastructure and goodwill. A state that is deeply embedded with those interests through interlocking boards, regulatory proximity, and the DOF’s supervisory role over both GOCCs and private banking licensure will hear those interests loudly.
A mutualized OFBank with its own strong capital base and global membership would weaken the state’s monopoly over a strategic remittance corridor. That sentence contains the entire political economy of this issue.
The Paternalism Beneath the Policy
Beyond the commercial interests, there is an older, uglier logic at work. The state has an enduring mistrust of collective agency among the marginalized. It is comfortable to write checks in dole-out-style livelihood programs, where beneficiaries are atomized and dependent on the next round of appropriations. It is far less comfortable enabling a global community of OFWs to own a bank, vote on its board, and channel their savings into projects beyond the direct control of central agencies.
It is the same paternalism that kept cooperatives weak for decades by subjecting them to agencies that had no stake in their success. It is the logic that treats the OFW not as a citizen investor but as a labor export commodity — to be protected when convenient, to be taxed indirectly through remittance fees and foreign exchange spreads, and to be celebrated every June with speeches and garlands. The OFW earns foreign exchange that helps stabilize the peso. In return, the state offers a bank that it refuses actually to hand over.
What Genuine Reform Looks Like
A serious government would present Congress with a legislative package that does three things. First, it would appropriate dedicated capital for OFBank in the GAA — not as a one-time infusion but as a multi-year commitment calibrated against a clear capitalization target. Second, it would establish a legal pathway for overseas Filipinos to acquire shares in OFBank, either directly or through a collective membership structure, with voting rights proportional to participation. Third, it would prohibit any merger, absorption, or organizational change that diminishes OFBank’s independence without the affirmative consent of its membership base.
None of this is technically complicated. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has the regulatory frameworks. The Congress has the appropriations power. What is missing is the political decision to treat the diaspora as principals rather than beneficiaries — as owners of the institution built on their labor and their sacrifice.
The OFWs who clean the apartments of the Gulf, nurse the patients of London and Riyadh, man the vessels crossing the Pacific, and wire home the billions that keep this economy breathing — they are not asking for charity. They are asking for what was promised: a bank of their own. The government’s continued hesitation to deliver it is not prudent. It is the silent admission that some promises were never meant to be kept.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Crispin Fernandez advocates for overseas Filipinos, public health, transformative political change, and patriotic economics. He is also a community organizer, leader, and freelance writer.
