With 70% of adult Filipinos having a GCash account, the fintech service has evolved from being an everyday wallet into people’s personal digital life hub, said Martha Sazon President and CEO of Mynt, the company behind the platform.
The massive adoption and increase in transactions have made GCash the “gold standard” in financial tech and made Mynt profitable in 2021, 3 years ahead of target, Sazon said in an online briefing this morning, February 10.
“As we made digital financial services part of the daily lives of Filipinos, we have also proven our ability to scale and create a sustainable business. We are proud to announce that we reached positive full year EBITDA and have achieved profitability 3 years ahead of target, making Mynt one of the very few fintechs in the world that is able to make money,” Sazon said.
GCash recorded P3.8 trillion in gross transaction value in 2021, more than tripling the P1.2 trillion recorded in 2020. The platform had 55 million registered users in 2021, close to doubling the user base of 33 million in 2020. It logged a peak of 26 million in daily log-ins and 17 million in daily transactions, tripling the figures the year prior.
“With millions of Filipinos relying on GCash for their daily routines, we further scaled up merchant acquisition and partnerships to widen our robust digital ecosystem,” Sazon said during Globe’s briefing today on its 4th quarter 2021 performance.
Mynt reported 4.5 million merchants and social sellers on GCash last year from 1 million in 2020. They also expanded the GCash cash-in and cash-out outlets to 174,000, Sazon said. They also signed up 290 GLife merchants in 2021 from just 8 when they started in December 2020.
Sazon highlighted the performance of GCash lending products, which will be one of the key priorities this year.
“Powered by a strong in-house trust platform called GScore, we aim to solve (financial inclusion) with our 2 new lending products GLoan and GGives in order to battle predatory rates of informal lenders. We launched GLoan as our quick cash loan offering with affordable and fair rates and in just 6 months since launch, we were able to disburse up to P1 billion worth of loans,” she said.
Sazon said they will scale up lending services this year by focusing on GGives, their installment product.
She also said that with GCash’s collaboration with government agencies, “the public sector now recognizes digital as a standard for good governance.”
GCash was able to distribute government cash assistance to 2.4 million Filipinos in just a few days. Had the money been doled out via physical distribution, Sazon said it would have taken 952 days.
“GCash is also instrumental in the tax collection efforts of the government by making over 100 tax payment types accessible through our app,” she said.
Sazon said GCash’s focus “on providing only the best user experience and relevant services,” gave then a 79.9 percent Net Promoter Score or NPS, a metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty.
“This is significant considering that the global NPS average for financial apps and overall financial services are just around 30% and 50% respectively. Our NPS puts us at the range of major trail blazers that are outside the category like Starbucks, which is at 77%, and Costco, at 79%,” she said. “Our world-class NPS caps off our wins for 2021 and helps further differentiate GCash from the competition.”
Sazon said the industry sees Filipinos “increasingly adopting digital including fintech” and the adoption of their platform has reached a point that “GCash has even become a verb.”
She said that the adoption of digital services, “a behavior formed during the lockdown, are sustained even as the economy opens up.”
GCash’s wide range of products and services fuels growth and adoption of the platform, she said. She cited as an example GCash Padala, their domestic remittance product. Sason said many recipients of remittances “eventually download GCash so the network even becomes bigger with the introduction and the trial of this service.”
She said they support the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in its “aspiration that half of transactions should be digital and 70% of Filipino adults should have formal financial accounts by 2023.”
