GCash makes investing possible with P50

Filipinos can now kickstart their investment journey for the price of a donut or a cup of milk tea, thanks to leading mobile wallet GCash, which is bringing investment to the mobile wallet.

Invest Money, a feature in the GCash app, is an online platform that allows users to invest in mutual funds straight from their smartphones for a minimum of only P50, making it the cheapest and most accessible investment vehicle in the country.

The price of entry is roughly the value of a fancy donut at Krispy Kreme or half the price of a large milk tea, a come-on for beginners in investments or those afraid to put their hard-earned money at risk.

Traditional investments, on the other hand, require a minimum capital of P5,000 to P10,000.

As of October, GCash users have opened 432,000 Unit Investment Trust Funds (UITF) accounts in the Peso Money Market Fund of GCash’s partner provider ATRAM Trust Corp., surpassing the number of retail UITF accounts in the Philippine banking system, according to Mynt, the company behind GCash.

GCash is the preferred mobile wallet by Filipinos for cashless transfers

E-wallet segment seen to continue expanding

GCash is the top mobile wallet used by Filipinos for cashless transactions, comprising 4.9 million out of the overall 6.4 million mobile wallet remitters in the country, according to a 2019 study conducted by The Nielsen Company.

Cashless transfers are defined as the use of any device or tool to send and receive money online, including bank transfers. Filipinos utilizing cashless transactions now comprise 19 percent or 9.3 million out of an estimated total 49 million who do money transfers. 

GCash Forest adds social features to promote green lifestyle

To make planting trees more fun, the country’s leading mobile wallet app has added social features to GCash Forest, a personal carbon tracker in the GCash app that contributes to the reforestation and rehabilitation of the Ipo watershed through green energy points earned. 

Ney Villaseñor, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Mynt, the company behind GCash, said GCash Forest users—now numbering more than 860,000—can invite their friends to join the GCash Forest green movement by sending them a link with their favorite social media app, such as Facebook or Telegram.

They can also allow GCash to access their contacts list so the mobile app can send an invite to their friends to interact through GCash Forest.

GCash PowerPay+ expands financial inclusion in Semirara Island

Empowered by its vision of financial inclusion, GCash, operated by Globe Fintech Innovations Inc. (Mynt), takes another leap towards the realization of its vision by bringing its financial services to far off sites like Semirara Island.

Located at the southern tip of Caluya, Antique, Semirara Island was almost untouched by development with lush vegetation, sandy beaches, and clear skies backdropping the beautiful people of the area.

As such, the closed island is only equipped with a single bank and six automated teller machines, serving over 19,000 residents that are heavily dependent on cash. Communities of workers would struggle to avail basic financial services, such as sending money to their families or even buying prepaid load for their cellphones. Individuals would have to allot time and effort to do something as menial as withdrawing cash to buy basic commodities, such as food, groceries or clothing items.

Act now, act fast: WWF PH, GCash call for participation of Filipinos in fight for PH forests

Over the last couple of years, the Philippines has been experiencing an alarming decrease in forest area. Due to rampant illegal logging and the lack of funds to better secure protected areas, the countries forests are going nude. 

Each year, based on data from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), around 47,000 hectares of forest cover is lost, which is equivalent to approximately 1.2 million hectares of deforested land in a hundred years. This translates to about 24 percent in deforestation rate, one of the fastest in the world. 

These figures may sound too statistical, but they are a constant and stark reminder for Filipinos of the state of Philippine forests. This is also a wakeup call for everyone that while the government pursues efforts to create a greener country, a great amount of work is still up ahead, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

AUB and GCash partnership to boost merchant acquisition in the QR payment space

Asia United Bank (AUB), one of the country’s fastest-growing publicly listed banks, has partnered with GCash, operated by Globe Fintech Innovations, Inc. (Mynt), an affiliate of Globe Telecom, Ant Financial (an Alibaba Group affiliate), and Ayala Corporation.

AUB is the pioneer Philippine QR Partner of e-wallet giants WeChat Pay, AliPay and UnionPay.

QR payment acceptance enabled close to 7,000 merchant outlets in the country to accept QR payments from Chinese tourists in a span of 1 year.  It launched the AUB PayMate, a mobile app, a web portal and an API that allows AUB to service merchants operating in different payment acceptance environment, whether self-employed, small & medium businesses or large retail chains. 

GCash Forest eyes 365 thousand trees planted in 365 days

Filipinos who want to contribute to environmental preservation can now conveniently use an innovative mobile phone app to help plant trees and increase the Philippines’ forest cover. 

Leading mobile wallet, GCash, is introducing an exciting “green” feature on the app called GCash Forest, which lets subscribers plant virtual trees that will have real-life counterparts. By the end of 365 days, GCash Forest aims to plant 365 thousand trees with the help of GCash subscribers.

Cashless Shopping Race

The aspiration of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for the country is to transform a fifth of total volume of transactions to non-cash methods by 2020.

Achieving this goal might sound to be a bit of a stretch, but it is highly doable, as the signs of the time point to two things — that Filipinos are now more receptive to disruptive technology and that handling cash is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Coding the future of payments: GCash breaches 50k QR merchant mark

The use of QR for mobile digital payments is very popular in various emerging and developed economies. In China, for example, mobile digital payments account for over half of the country’s total transaction volumes.

In the Philippines, the use of the said technology is still in its nascent stage, and has yet to see an explosion in usage today. 

Despite this GCash, operated by Globe Fintech Innovations Inc. (Mynt), sees the value of setting up as many QR-enabled merchants as possible, as it believes that the future of mobile digital payments lies on innovative technologies.