While GCash counts 2.5 million merchants as its customers, to date its growth has historically been driven by the retail segment, whether in payments, lending or otherwise. This segment can be fickle, moving among different e-wallets to capture subsidies and other perks, so it is important that GCash find ways to embed retail users into its ecosystem.
One way is to make sure that they use GCash for payments overseas. Thanks to a partnership with Alipay+, Ant Group-backed GCash now can offer its retail customers the ability to pay for cashless transactions in 17 countries, while it has also enabled users overseas to sign up for GCash using international mobile numbers in six countries including the United States, Italy and Japan. Additionally, given the Philippine company’s partnership with Visa, users of its GCash card can make cashless transactions with over 80 million merchants in 200 countries.
Another way to capitalize on the growth in overseas users would be to impose fees on its remittance services given the massive number of Filipino migrant workers. In 2022, the Philippines was the world’s No. 4 inbound remittances market after India, Mexico and China. The lack of fees has been instrumental to the fast scaling of the remittances business, but to ensure profitability with an IPO likely in 2024-2025 GCash has to show investors it can monetize its core services. Fitch Ratings recommends that the fees range from 0.2% to 2%.
Meanwhile, at the Singapore FinTech Festival, GCash CEO Martha Sazon mooted expansion of the company’s B2B services. She emphasized that GCash should “address the pain points and the friction that’s in the B2B space to make it a more meaningful play for us.” A few days later, G-Xchange Inc. (GXI) – a subsidiary of GCash that acts as its operator – CEO Ren-Ren Reyes told local media that GXI is looking into ways to help non-registered businesses in social media to get on board "GCash for Business."
The company seems to want to persuade sellers on social media using personal GCash accounts to migrate over to business accounts and move out of a legal gray area. Going forward, provided GCash can work effectively with regulators, this could become an increasingly important part of its B2B play.