MICRO, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the Philippines benefit from the partnership of leading local mobile wallet GCash and payments facilitator PayMongo that provides them an expanded mobile settlements platform.
The former is now live as a payment channel for 3,500 online sellers
registered in the latter’s
portal.
“PayMongo provides the easiest way for Filipino merchants to accept credit card, e-wallet and over-the-counter payments,” PayMongo Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Francis Plaza said, citing that they are backed by Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, Peter Thiel and Stripe.
With its 20 million users and over 50,000 partner merchants, GCash has been at the forefront of creating a cashless payment system in the Philippines, in line with its financial inclusion goal.
In fact, it has won several awards and citations from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas for its innovations in mobile financial services.
“A strong cashless ecosystem will benefit MSMEs, who are the backbone of
our economy. With PayMongo, GCash will help social and online entrepreneurs to
optimize their businesses and grow in the Internet economy,” GCash President
and CEO Anthony
Thomas said.
Based on figures obtained from the Philippine Statistics Authority, a total of 1,003,111 enterprises have been operating nationwide as of 2018, of which 998,342, or 99.52 percent, are MSMEs.
The majority of these kinds of businesses are located in Metro Manila, creating 63.19 percent of all jobs in the country.
Since MSMEs comprised the significant number of registered entities across the nation, a fintech start-up like PayMongo targets them, together with online and social merchants, requiring improved payments experience.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with GCash in enabling more commerce online. Our vision of building the financial infrastructure to grow the Internet economy faster needs partners like GCash that provides every person an ability to participate and thrive in this digital age,” Plaza said.
“As GCash strives to reach the unbanked and underserved Filipinos, we will continue to build relationships with companies like PayMongo that use fintech to provide financial services to Filipinos,” Thomas added.