Here's something most people don't know about Mark Joseph Funilas — he never planned any of this.
The global politics obsession, the Model UN conferences, the passion for foreign affairs — that was the dream. Business was the detour. But somewhere along the way, the detour became the destination, and Mark arrived at something more interesting than either path could have offered alone.
Today, he's an incoming 4th-year Accounting Information Systems student at Mapúa University who builds financial models by habit, designs sustainability frameworks by curiosity, and founds organizations by instinct. He's currently writing a thesis on compliance quality in Philippine sustainability reporting — complete with an original scoring rubric he designed from scratch, grounded in IFRS, TCFD, and ISSB standards — because apparently that's what happens when you combine an AIS degree with a genuine obsession for how institutions behave.
He's also a certified QuickBooks and Xero ProAdvisor, a competition finalist in international business case and ESG sustainability challenges, the President of JPIA-Mapúa, and the founder of Vision Vault — a youth innovation hub he built because waiting around for someone else to create the right platform felt like a waste of time.
His long game? Building solutions at the intersection of financial systems, sustainability, and technology — specifically for markets like the Philippines that the rest of the world is only beginning to pay attention to.
But that's the long answer. The short answer is: he builds things. And he's just getting started.