PayMaya: No more FOMO with virtual, mobile wallet

MANILA, Philippines - Now it can be said: You can banish the fear of missing out (FOMO).

From music to e-books to gaming to social media, our electronic pleasures are crossing over to more practical things. We want to buy apps, we want to shop online. We want the convenience of just tapping a card at the MRT, or the push-button, cashless approach to hailing a cab or booking a vacation place.  

But if there are only roughly 30 million people who have access to a payment wallet and only three million who own a credit card in a country of 110 million people, FOMO could be very real, especially among younger consumers.

Nations are still striving to close the digital divide or the technology gap that throws populations into opposing halves – the connected and the unconnected, but even among the connected there is a divide. The unbanked and the ‘uncarded’ will always remain lurkers in the fringes of an ecosystem that relies heavily not just on technology but also financial inclusion.

The country’s biggest telco group is building a mobile payment ecosystem that may be able to stitch together the loose ends of the e-commerce loop that leave emerging countries like the Philippines on the wayside.

Smart eMoney, the digital financial services unit of PLDT and Smart Communications, is all over town lately convincing people to download the mobile app that facilitates payments for digital transactions.

The PayMaya virtual credit card that resides in the app practically allows one to purchase things online, send money to another person, send telco airtime load to a prepaid mobile number, and soon, to pay bills online, or pay for cab rides and vacation places.

No application forms to fill out, no background checks, no documents to submit. It’s a prepaid, loadable card. Top it off with the amount you need in accredited reloading centers and you’re ready to transact.

PLDT reported in its last earnings report in March a combined prepaid and postpaid cellular subscriber base of 69.9 million for all its brands – Smart, Talk ’N Text and Sun Cellular. Prepaid subscribers, however, are clearly still dominant and Filipino consumers are not really alien to the concept of loading up.

Paolo Azzola, co-COO of Smart eMoney, however, emphasizes that the service is telco-agnostic, which means that anybody with a mobile number in the country, whether postpaid or prepaid and regardless of network, can download the PayMaya app.

“We are not just building a platform from scratch, we are building a very deep level of expertise within payments,” he says, noting that the telco has built Smart Money 15 years ago, which supports Smart Padala, the country’s biggest remittance company today.

Paying with Paymaya

PayMaya has two channels – one is the mobile app that functions as a virtual visa card that can be used to pay for purchases in online stores that accept Visa payments, and a physical card that allows one to pay for purchases in physical stores like malls, coffee shops or department stores and also doubles up as a Beep Card that could pay for MRT and LRT rides.

The two cards are linked and can be topped up in over 15,000 establishments nationwide, including all 7-11 convenience stores, Robinson’s Mall Business Centers, SM Mall Business Centers and all Smart Padala Centers and Smart Jump Centers.

Azzola gave assurances that they are fast tracking the accreditation of more reloading stations. Soon, he says, customers can also link their bank accounts to PayMaya for auto loading.

Smart eMoney is the first non-financial institution in Southeast Asia to receive an issuing and acquiring a license from Visa. This allows them to issue Visa-branded prepaid cards, acquire merchant transactions, and offer Visa products and services.

“We are an acquirer, a payments processor, as well as an issuer. We complete the entire ecosystem of payments,” he says.

PayMaya’s launch came on the heels of a survey in Asia-Pacific conducted by Visa showing that consumers in the region are increasing likely to make their online purchases and bill payments through mobile devices (mobile phone or tablet), rather than via desktops. Visa’s 2015 Regional eCommerce Monitor Survey also shows that travel, bills, movies, fashion and personal electronics were the top five categories for e-commerce.

As the omni-channel approach to retailing becomes entrenched, requiring more innovative payment options, it is not only the consumers that are developing an outsized FOMO. Brands and businesses also have an enterprise-level FOMO on a potentially significant addressable market that may not have the means to participate in the known currencies of the digital age.

Azzola says PayMaya has a merchant program that incentivizes brands and businesses to sign up for PayMaya Business Solutions that would allow them to accept payments from debit, credit or ATM payments for online and in-store transactions hassle-free.  

Still a work in progress 

Many of the features of PayMaya are still in development such as the mechanism to pay bills through the mobile app. With almost a hundred engineers completely dedicated to building the financial services  platform, it would be just a matter of time before more features are rolled out.

The company, however, is vocal about its ambition to go global. Azzola says this early, PayMaya already has a very clear roadmap for rollout in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets. 

“We don’t think about it as only a Filipino product. It’s built in the Philippines. We are very proud of that, but we want to export it,” he says.

Though he would not disclose the next target country for the rollout, he hinted at other Southeast Asian countries that have large unbanked populations like the Philippines where consumers are equally digitally-savvy and are just as excited to buy stuff online.

“I think we are positioned in the best cluster of emerging markets and by the time we are done with this cluster here we will be ready to go global, too,” he ends.