BY the end of 2016, the digital-financial services arm of Smart Communications Inc. would have increased its user base by 10 times and reached the P200-billion mark in terms of transactions, officials of PayMaya Philippines Inc. said on Tuesday.
PayMaya COO Paolo Azzola said his group targets to close the year with at least a million users, banking on the need of Filipinos for digital-wallet services. “Our growth has been staggering in 2016, so I hope 2017 will be even better. We want to take our user base for PayMaya to the seven-digit mark by this year,” he said in an interview.
According to BusinessMirror estimates, the company posted a 500-percent increase in user base from 2015, when it had roughly 166,000 PayMaya users. There are about 600,000 PayMaya users today, with customer-acquisition rate anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 new users on a daily basis.
“We are primed to succeed in this, given that we have shown we are able to succeed in the Philippines. So far, we’ve shown great promise both on consumer—which has been growing by tenfold—and on the merchant sides,” he said.
The company, he said, will also be able to reach its P200-billion transaction volume target by year-end.
“The targets for the next three years are extremely ambitious. The year 2016 was a build year, 2017 would be a scale year, when we take our talents to some other countries,” he said. “The year 2017 for us will be an important year, as we dip our toes in a couple of new experiences.”
“New experiences,” Azzola said, are emerging markets in Asean.
Aside from this, the COO of Voyager Innovations Benjie S. Fernandez said, is also cooking up partnerships with “global leaders” to further improve its services.
“We have exciting global partnerships coming up. They are global players and are not just in the financial space. They are very relevant players that will make the user experience of transacting very exciting,” he said separately.
Fernandez did not elaborate.
The company recently struck a collaboration deal with global digital-payments provider PayPal to make it more convenient for users to withdraw their PayPal funds using PayMaya. This partnership, PayMaya President Orlando B. Vea said, is particularly helpful for freelancers.
World Bank East Asia and Pacific Economic Update said the Philippines is marked as the country with the largest number of freelancers in relation to country population, followed by India, the United States, Pakistan and Bangladesh. With the partnership, freelancers no longer have to travel to financial institutions, fall in long lines, answer forms and secure a minimum initial deposit. All they need to do is download the PayMaya app from the Google Play or the App Store to have an instant virtual Visa card that they can immediately use for transactions, including online purchases, bills payments and PayPal transfers.
“Our collaboration with the global payment leader PayPal aims to break platform barriers hindering our independent earners from realizing their full potential whether as a working individual or an online business,” Vea said. PayMaya is the first prepaid online payment app that enables the financially underserved to pay online without a credit card.