For many Filipinos, preparing for retirement remains easier to understand in principle than to put into practice. While the Personal Equity and Retirement Account (PERA) has been available since 2008 as a voluntary and portable retirement savings vehicle, participation has remained limited relative to the country’s working population.

EastWest has been working to help close that gap by building a broader retirement ecosystem around PERA—one that brings together employee participation, investment products, digital access, and industry partnerships to make long-term investing easier to understand and access.

That approach recently earned EastWest Business Product Innovation of the Year at the Asian Innovation Excellence Awards for its PERA program.

Rather than treating PERA as a stand-alone investment product, EastWest first put the framework into practice within its own organization. The Bank became the first universal bank in the Philippines to sponsor a PERA program for its employees, creating an operating model that brings together the administrator, custodian, product provider, compliance processes, and employee education needed to make the program work.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) also noted that EastWest is the first universal bank to launch an employer-sponsored PERA program with voluntary enrollment. The BSP has encouraged other banks and corporations to consider similar programs, citing PERA’s potential to help employees save and invest while supporting broader participation in the country’s capital markets.

EastWest has also developed a broader range of PERA investment options. As an accredited PERA Product Provider, the Bank offers PERA Unit Investment Trust Funds (UITFs) designed for different risk profiles and investment objectives. It is also the only bank in the Philippines with regulatory approval for a Dollar PERA UITF through an S&P 500 feeder fund, giving future PERA investors access to investment opportunities beyond the domestic market.

At the same time, EastWest is working with digital administrators and other ecosystem partners to support onboarding, know-your-customer processes, fund transfers, and monitoring. These efforts are intended to address some of the barriers that have held back PERA participation, including limited awareness, perceived complexity, and accessibility.

For individuals, PERA provides several incentives for long-term retirement investing, including a 5% income tax credit on annual contributions, tax-free investment income, and tax-free qualified distributions, while allowing account holders to retain ownership and portability of their assets.

Employers can also play a role. According to the BSP, private employers that match or exceed PERA contributions for qualified employees may claim tax deductions equivalent to 150% of the employer’s share, combining the deduction provided under the PERA law with the additional incentive under the Capital Markets Efficiency Promotion Act.

EastWest’s longer-term goal is to help move PERA from a relatively underused retirement framework into a more connected system involving employers, administrators, product providers, digital platforms, and regulators. By developing the products, partnerships, and channels around PERA, the Bank aims to give more Filipinos a practical way to invest for their future and retirement.