By Mia Rodriguez
With the rapid growth that PayMaya Philippines Inc. has seen in less than a year’s time, the financial technology arm of Smart Communications Inc. on Thursday announced it is now looking to expand in emerging Asean markets.
Orlando B. Vea, who sits as the president of the financial services company, confirmed plans to expand to other countries in the region.
“Initially, we’ll start with the Asean. But we are targeting other markets outside Asia,” he said. “It is now on the works.”
Vea told the BusinessMirror his company has been growing by more than a quarter in the past few months since it launched in August.
Currently, less than a million users avail themselves of the services of PayMaya. With the growth rate that it has been enjoying since last year, its client base has been exponentially expanding.
“We hope to reach 1.5 million users by the end of 2016,” Vea told the BusinessMirror.
Transactions that flowed through the pipe of PayMaya—most of which are online purchase payments—have reached “more than P100 billion” as of today.
The company aims to breach the P200-billion mark in transaction volume this year.
PayMaya COO Benjamin S. Fernandez said the company may have to “revisit its target,” given its transaction volume history in the first half, and the company’s efforts in teaming up with other enterprises.
It is currently on the last stages of striking up deals with 10 companies.
“Within the month of July, we will see more than half of that happen, including some international partnerships,” he said, alluding to Manila Electric Co. (Meralco), Maynilad Water Services Inc. and Metro Pacific Tollways Corp.
Introduced in August 2015, PayMaya is the first of its kind, all-in-one digital payments mobile app that can be used for online shopping, peer-to-peer transfers and telco airtime reloading.
It also comes with a physical PayMaya Visa card that can be used for any face-to-face transaction with any merchant accepting Visa, as well as automated teller machine withdrawals.
There are over 15,000 PayMaya reloading stations nationwide, ensuring that reloading accounts remains convenient. Reloading stations are in SM Malls Business Centers, Robinsons Malls Business Centers, Bayad Centers, 7-Eleven stores with Cliqq kiosks, TouchPay Kiosks and Smart Padala Centers, on top of online banking via BDO.
On Thursday PayMaya introduced its brand ambassadors to further drive growth to the company. The new ambassadors are volleyball player Alyssa Valdez, fashion designer Camille Co, men’s fashion guru Seph Cham, food stylist Chichi Tullao, disk jockey Carlo Atendido, travel blogger Jonas Roque and professional online players Team Mineski.