When AI Simplifies Finance: How PACE Turns a Week-Long Process Into Minutes
Inside the development of PACE—an AI-powered payment acceleration engine that shows how intelligent automation can unlock hidden value for real estate buyers, developers, and lenders alike.
The Hidden Cost of Staying Silent
Real estate buyers at Ayala Land can finance up to 80% of their purchase price, with the balance due as a lump-sum payment years later—typically five to six years out.
This structure makes sense for the buyer (payment flexibility) and for Ayala Land (deferred cash, predictable revenue). But it comes with a hidden cost: buyers who want to pay early have almost no incentive to ask.
Here's why: if a buyer inquired about prepaying their balance, the process was entirely manual. Multiple teams would need to be involved. Excel spreadsheets would be pulled. Computations would be verified. And the buyer would wait—five to eight business days or more—for an answer to a straightforward question: "What discount would I get if I paid off early?"
Most buyers didn't bother asking. They simply paid on schedule, and Ayala Land left money on the table in the form of extended financing exposure and deferred cash collection.
This wasn't a problem of bad intentions or poor customer service. It was a problem of process friction so high that no one had an incentive to engage.
The Insight: Make the Invisible Visible
Ayala Land's product team—in partnership with BPI (the lending partner) and Inquiro (an AI-focused builder)—started with a radically different question: What if buyers could see their prepayment discount instantly?
The research hypothesis was simple: If buyers knew the financial benefit of paying early, they'd be far more likely to do it.
To test this, they built a prototype—a chatbot powered by AI agents that could compute an NPV-based prepayment discount in real time, and show buyers what financing options BPI would offer if they decided to settle early.
Then they tested it with real buyers.
The results were not subtle.
The Validation: A 2x Jump in Intent
Ayala Land ran a pilot with 19 employee-buyers—all with real outstanding property balances, most still early in their payment terms.
Each participant used the PACE chatbot (which stands for Payment Acceleration & Conversion Engine) and completed a before-and-after survey.
The findings:
2x increase in prepayment likelihood — Buyers "likely" to settle early jumped from 32% to 68% just from seeing their discount
+1.1 point increase on a 5-point scale — The average likelihood to prepay rose significantly after seeing the NPV calculation
95% said the discount changed their mind — The visualization alone shifted how buyers viewed early settlement
63% didn't know discounts existed — This revealed an enormous awareness gap. The discount was already in Ayala Land's policy. Buyers simply didn't know about it
84% found the tool easy to use — Zero friction on the experience side
79% were drawn to BPI financing — When presented with loan options alongside their prepayment discount, most pilot users showed interest
The core insight was validated: visibility + simplicity = conversion.
How PACE Works: Four Agents, One Seamless Journey
PACE is not a traditional software product. It's an agentic system—a network of specialized AI agents, each with a defined role and clear boundaries.
Here's the flow:
Agent 1: Customer Profile
A buyer or seller selects an account. Agent 1 instantly retrieves verified payment history, outstanding balance, and contract terms directly from Ayala Land's systems. No guesswork, no manual data entry.
Agent 2: Settlement Optimization
Agent 2 applies pre-approved NPV formulas and settlement rules to compute the prepayment discount. It also evaluates different payment scenarios and recommends the option that creates the best fit for the buyer.
Agent 3: BPI Pre-Assessment
For full payoffs, Agent 3 tiers the account against BPI's credit criteria (Tier 1 and Tier 2 qualification levels), builds the loan amortization, and generates a complete, pre-assessed referral ready for BPI's review.
Agent 4: Amicassa Exceptions
For partial or non-standard requests, Agent 4 creates a ticket with all relevant data and routes it to the finance team for human review.
The result? What used to take 5–8 business days now takes minutes.
The Safeguards: Human-in-the-Loop From the Start
PACE is deliberately designed with governance built in, not bolted on.
The agents never approve exceptions—those remain with Ayala Land's finance team.
And critically, BPI retains the final credit decision on all financing. The engine recommends; humans approve.
This design serves two purposes:
It protects both institutions from risk
It maintains the human relationship at the moment it matters most—when a customer is about to make a major financial decision
PACE is a tool that augments human judgment, not a system that replaces it.
The Value: Three Parties, Three Benefits
For Ayala Land
Faster cash recovery. Deferred balances move into near-term collections, reducing Ayala Land's financing exposure
Better visibility. Proactive outreach via account management teams can now offer prepayment discounts to qualified buyers who never knew they existed
Operational efficiency. Removing the manual computation work frees up the finance team to focus on exceptions and strategy, not routine calculations
For BPI
Earlier, better-qualified referrals. Rather than being asked about financing 3–6 months before a lump sum comes due, BPI gets pre-assessed referrals years earlier, when the buyer can make a thoughtful decision
Stronger pipeline quality. PACE presents financing options within the context of a real customer need (early settlement), not as a cold outreach
Lower financing risk. Earlier engagement means BPI has more time to structure the right product for the buyer's needs
For Buyers
Instant clarity. No more waiting a week for an answer to a straightforward question
Better options. Prepayment discounts and financing scenarios presented side-by-side, so buyers can make informed decisions
Control. Access to payment illustrations and next-best offers anytime, not just during business hours
Beyond Prepayment: PACE as a Reusable Conversion Engine
Here's where the vision gets bigger.
The core capability that powers PACE—retrieve verified data → apply approved rules → compute personalized options → recommend next best action → route to execution—is not specific to prepayment discounts.
The same pattern can unlock value across Ayala Land's entire ecosystem:
Within Ayala Land (immediate opportunities):
Settlement offers at turnover (when buyers take possession of their units)
Seller decision support and instant payment illustrations
Collections prioritization and past-due restructuring options
Across the Ayala Group (adjacent opportunities):
ACMobility: Vehicle and EV financing, trade-in and leasing scenarios
ACEN: Solar financing and energy-savings payback calculations
AC Health: Treatment package comparisons and payment eligibility
Ayala Malls: Tenant restructuring and lease renewal scenarios
GCash & Globe: Installment eligibility and device financing
The ultimate vision: PACE as an orchestration layer that connects customers to the most relevant Ayala solution at the right moment in their journey.
An ALI buyer making a prepayment decision → gets a settlement offer → connects to BPI financing → pays via GCash → discovers a Globe service they need.
Each touchpoint surfaced intelligently, at exactly the right time.
Recognition: AI/Synergy Challenge Season 2 Special Award for Value
In July 2026, PACE was recognized with a Special Award for Value at the AI/Synergy Challenge Season 2—Ayala's internal competition for AI-powered innovation and business model transformation.
The recognition validated what the pilot data already showed: that PACE wasn't just a feature, but a fundamentally different approach to customer engagement and value creation.
More importantly, it signaled organizational buy-in for scaling beyond the proof of concept.
What Makes PACE Different
In the fintech and business automation space, there's a common pattern: build a tool, get adoption wrong, watch it collect dust.
PACE avoided this trap through deliberate design choices:
Started with buyer behavior, not technology. The question wasn't "What AI can we build?" but "What do buyers actually need?" The technology followed the insight.
Validated before scaling. Nineteen real users with real data. Pre- and post-surveys. Measurable behavioral change. No projections, no assumptions.
Built for ecosystem value, not ALI alone. By partnering closely with BPI from day one and designing for mutual benefit, PACE created conditions for sustainable adoption across two institutions.
Made governance central, not optional. Human approval remains at every critical junction. The system accelerates, but never eliminates, human decision-making.
Positioned it as a platform, not a point solution. From the start, PACE was designed as the foundation for broader ecosystem automation, not as a one-off calculator.
What's Next
The immediate priority is controlled implementation:
Pilot scope aligned across Ayala Land and BPI stakeholders
Business rules validated with Finance and Risk
Data access and governance finalized with InfoSec and Legal
Success metrics defined — conversion lift, collections acceleration, adoption rates, BPI referral quality
Measurement framework in place to guide scaling decisions
The medium-term vision is clear: prove the model within Ayala Land's core use case (prepayment acceleration), then extend it to adjacent scenarios (turnover settlement, collections support, seller decision support).
The long-term ambition is to transform PACE into an Ayala Group conversion platform—a reusable engine that any Ayala company can tap into to move customers from consideration to decision to execution.
The Larger Lesson
PACE tells a story about how modern AI doesn't have to be mysterious or adversarial. It can be:
Transparent. Buyers see exactly why they're getting a discount
Governed. Humans remain in control of every approval
Human-centered. It solves a real problem that people care about
Economically aligned. It creates genuine mutual value, not just operational efficiency
In an era of AI skepticism, PACE is a quiet reminder that the most powerful applications aren't the most complex. They're the ones that take a painful, manual process that nobody wants to do, and make it so simple and fast that both humans and systems work together naturally.
About Ayala Land's Innovation Program
PACE was developed through Ayala's internal AI/Synergy Challenge program, which brings together product leaders, engineers, and business partners to identify high-impact, feasible AI opportunities across the conglomerate.
The project was built by a cross-functional team: Ayala Land Product and Finance, BPI Loans Leadership, Inquiro (AI implementation partner), and mentorship from Ayala Corporation's innovation leadership.
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