PayMaya for Enterprise, GCash for Peers

A week ago, I was asked to judge an online pitch competition for communications students, and during intermissions, I heard a commercial by PayMaya (one of the sponsors of the event) referring to it as “too big to be no. 2”. It got me very curious. Has PayMaya conceded the e-Wallet war against GCash?

I would not believe it at first so I Googled a bit and actually found a number of press releases, many of which are actually using the hashtag “#TooGoodToBeNo.2“. So yes, PayMaya is admitting they’re just 2nd to GCash and they’re even publicizing it. That’s brave.

There were a lot of stories on blogs and traditional media about #TooGoodToBeNo.2 between November to December 2021 and the slant was that despite it being just the 2nd most popular e-Wallet, it had the most complete features.

As of today, the PayMaya app has 613,645 downloads in the Google Play Store while GCash has 1,021,545.

This validates some of the observations I’ve had for the last two years. For micro-transactions such as peer-to-peer, it’s almost always GCash. For small merchants like the Potato Corner across the street, it’s GCash. Even the roving fruit and vegetable cart that passes by the house every morning, kuya accepts GCash. And for the last 14 months, I’ve bought (commonly referred to in the circles as “mined”) over 600 pots of plants, and the majority of them were paid via GCash. It’s followed by BPI, then BDO but not once I was asked to pay via PayMaya.

So yes admittedly, the dominance of GCash in the market is undeniable.

On the other hand, many of the big stores I’ve been to are now using PayMaya POS terminals to process credit card transactions.

Been to Home Depot, Wilcon and I think even in Ikea the last time we went there — all of them were using PayMaya.

PayMaya as a POS payment gateway accepts Visa, Mastercard, GrabPay, WeChatPay, JCB and QRPh. That’s more than enough to basically attract many merchants.

It’s an interesting turn-out and all of these happened during the pandemic. Fintech is still a big space and we’re not saying GCash wins the masses and PayMaya wins the merchants.

It would be interesting to see what each would do to eat into the other’s market.