Turbocharging the Filipino bourse

The Philippine economy is one of the fastest growing in Asia. Our population is young and digital. Our entrepreneurs are quietly building world class platforms in fintech, transport, logistics, mobility and energy. The ingredients of a great capital market are already here. The next chapter of the Philippine Stock Exchange will not be written by defending what we have, but by opening the doors wide to the digital economy that is already remaking Filipino life. The path is clear, the playbook exists and the moment to move is now.
Start with the size of the opportunity. The PSE today trades a daily average of roughly P7.33 billion, or about $126 million. Bursa Malaysia trades around $760 million a day. Singapore about $1.2 billion. The Indonesia Stock Exchange about $1 billion. Hong Kong well over $25 billion. 

That gap is not a verdict on the PSE. It is a runway. Every peso of Filipino savings that today flows into low-yield time deposits, foreign mutual funds or speculative real estate is a peso that can flow into Filipino enterprise the moment we give it the right ladder to climb.
The reason our peers pulled ahead is no mystery. Their exchanges opened up to the new economy faster. The PSE’s current listing framework was designed in an industrial era, when cement, banks and conglomerates were the only companies of consequence. It rewards three full years of audited profitability and steady earnings. That is a reasonable rule for a power utility. It is the wrong rule for a fast scaling technology firm reinvesting every peso into growth. 

The most dynamic exchanges have already updated their playbooks. They allow dual class shares so founders can raise public capital without losing operational control. They offer growth boards with lighter rules for digital businesses. They actively court the founders. The PSE can do the same, and there are encouraging signs that its current leadership sees this clearly.

Consider what happened next door. In April 2022, GoTo, the holding company of Gojek and Tokopedia, listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange and raised about $1.1 billion. Around 300,000 new investors took part, the highest in the history of that bourse. One company. One day. The stock has had its ups and downs since, but the structural effect was permanent. GoTo broke the psychological barrier that kept Indonesian founders looking only to New York. 

It validated digital listings as a category. It pulled global capital into Jakarta. By the end of 2025, the Indonesian stock exchange had become the largest in ASEAN by market capitalization, comfortably among the top 20 in the world. They built a market by letting their entrepreneurs in.
Now imagine the Filipino version. Picture GCash listing on the PSE. A platform tapped hundreds of millions of times a day for everything from jeepney rides to grocery runs. Picture Maya. Picture our motorcycle ride hailing leaders like Angkas or Joyride, the BPO platforms employing more than a million Filipinos, the renewable energy developers building our future grid, the digital logistics players knitting together the archipelago. Each of those listings could do for the PSE what GoTo did for Jakarta. 

They would mint hundreds of thousands of new retail investors. They would transform the daily volume curve. They would tell global capital that the Filipino bourse is open for the future, not just custodian of the past.

Here is the most beautiful part. When a Filipino who uses GCash 20 times a day can also buy a share of GCash, he stops being just a consumer of the digital economy and becomes its owner. The grandmother sending money to her grandchildren becomes a shareholder in the rails that make it happen. 

The biker delivering food becomes a part owner of the platform he serves. The 14 million OFWs sending home about $39 billion every year finally have a way to own the country they are building, instead of parking their savings in someone else’s market. Wealth created in the Philippines stays in the Philippines, spreads across more Filipino hands and compounds at home.

The reforms needed are practical, not radical. A modernized growth board with lighter rules and lower profit thresholds for digital companies. Permission for dual class shares within sensible guardrails. Targeted tax incentives for technology listings. 

Employee ownership programs at IPO so that drivers, riders, agents and frontline staff become shareholders, the way GoTo allocated stock to its driver-partners. Each of these is well within reach of our regulators and the PSE’s leadership, and each has been done successfully elsewhere. None of it requires reinventing the wheel. It only requires choosing to build the next decade rather than maintain the last one.

The Filipino Century will not be built only in factories or on farms. It will rise on apps, on platforms, on lines of code written in Cebu and Manila and Davao, by founders already proving that world class businesses can come from these islands. 

The Philippine Stock Exchange has been a faithful steward of Filipino capital for nearly a hundred years. Its next chapter, if we choose it, will be the most exciting yet. 

A deeper bourse. A digital pivot. A million new Filipino owners. The future is not waiting somewhere else. It is waiting here, on a trading floor in Bonifacio Global City, for us to ring the bell.