The regional expansion of digital-innovations company Voyager Innovations Inc. hinges on its success in the Philippines and—by the looks of it—the company will start embarking on a journey to another Southeast Asian country by 2017.
Voyager Chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan said the digital-innovations arm of PLDT Inc. will hit critical mass by year-end, thus, allowing the company to expand its operations outside the Philippines.
“We’re trying to ensure that we first hit critical mass here in the Philippines before we are able to expand overseas,” he told the BusinessMirror. “But the idea is really to expand it to other parts of Asia other than China.”
Voyager and its digital financial-services arm PayMaya Philippines Inc. process about 25 percent of domestic remittance volume, which roughly translates to P80 billion to P90 billion per year.
“The volumes are growing quite fast. So the expansion can happen by next year. We still don’t have a ballpark figure on the capital, but we may have to increase it because during the initial year or two of any digital innovation, you incur losses as you try to build critical mass. So we have to calibrate that,” he said.
He described competition in the Asean region as uneven. Still, he is confident that Voyager and PayMaya will be able to thrive in such an environment.
“Competition is uneven in developing Asean. I’m sure there are similar innovations, so in many respects we are trying to compete,” Pangilinan said.
Voyager offers a suite of digital platforms through Voyager Business.
Chief of these offerings is Freenet, the sponsored data platform of Voyager. Through Freenet, brands and enterprises can provide free access to their mobile apps or web sites to their customers without data charges for Smart, TNT and Sun subscribers.
TackThis! Concierge, meanwhile, is a fully managed e-commerce service suite that makes it easy for brands to sell easily online. It helps businesses put up their online stores, manage payments and logistics platforms and digital marketing of products, so firms can focus on running their core businesses.
Large enterprises, on the other hand, can take advantage of Takatack Rewards to digitally enable their rewards and incentives systems by providing an e-wallet to their employees, which they can spend on Takatack, one of the largest online marketplaces in the country today.
Furthermore, PayMaya Business makes it easy and convenient for merchants to accept card payments both online and face-to-face. This is made possible by PayMaya Swipe and PayMaya Checkout, which are just some of the products under Voyager subsidiary PayMaya Philippines Inc.
And to help brands reach their markets via mobile, Hatch offers a selection of rich mobile-marketing services, such as SMS+, mobile magazines, pop-up stores, zero-rating and customer surveys, among others, that can be deployed to the tens of millions of consumers in its mobile opt-in base.