GLOBE Telecom Inc. President Ernest L. Cu admitted it may take a decade before the company’s financial-technology (fintech) subsidiary contributes a significant amount of revenues to the telco group, as it first needs to build critical mass in both user base and usage.
Cu said compared the Globe Telecom unit to China’s Ant Financial, an investor in Globe Fintech Innovations Inc. (Mynt), Globe’s fintech arm. The said company directly owns GCash, a virtual wallet that allows users to pay bills, send money and purchase goods online.
“In China it took five to seven years before things happened. Today, we’re not even looking at revenues at the moment, we’re looking at building the active user base, making the experience more convenient and more relevant to people,” Cu said in an interview. “We’re looking at improving the cash in experience, we’re looking at increasing the merchants base that accepts GCash, and from there, we’ll see what happens in the revenues.”
Also within that period, GCash should have more than 20 million users, transacting billions of pesos in a monthly basis.
“Our goals is to go north of 20 million users in five to seven years,” Cu said. “What we are focused on doing today is gaining momentum because I think it’s with that momentum—that more and more merchants will want to sign up, more and more people will want to download the app and use the payment experience.”
Currently, there are about 5 million GCash users in the Philippines, transacting about P6 billion per month.
Just recently, Globe partnered with malls under the Ayala, SM and Robinsons groups for the introduction of the a new payment scheme using the GCash application. Through their mobile phones, subscribers can now pay for their retail purchases using the scan-to-pay option in their GCash accounts.
