Grab and SM Investments Corporation has announced a partnership that will expand the GrabPay mobile wallet in the Philippines.
Grab and SM will collaborate in three broad areas:
• Universal acceptance of the GrabPay wallet: Soon, Grab users can use their GrabPay wallet to pay for shopping items, grocery supplies, cinema tickets and other goods and services from offline stores such as The SM STORE, SM Supermarket, SM Cinema and other partners that are part of SM’s and BDO’s extensive merchant network.
• Greater convenience to their consumers. Grab users can soon load their GrabPay mobile wallet directly from BDO bank accounts, BDO ATMs, SM Business Centers and 2GO’s retail network. Consumers can soon top-up their GrabPay wallet all across the Philippines, with these new top-up channels adding to a rapidly growing network that includes banks, convenience stores, cards and wallets, and driver-partners.
• Greater benefits to both customer bases: Dedicated Green Lanes will also be set-up for GrabPay users in SM establishments. These are express checkout counters that will allow GrabPay users to skip the regular payment queues.
GrabPay and SM support the goal of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in transitioning 20% of all transactions into cashless by 2020.
Hmm.. GCash and PayMaya are still not a payment method in SM supermarket and hypermarket. Good luck with that. This has been a promised for decades now. Remember e-Plus, Visa tap to pay?
Majority of the drivers that I conversed with doesn’t like this method. They claimed that their operators do not remit their share, perhaps their daily income, instantly. Once they see that the payment method of the booker is not cash, they’ll reject it almost surely. Not to mention that cash payers have additional monetary tips sometimes, something that can’t be done via cashless method.
In China, it’s about 90%. Cash is ever hardly used. Even street vendors accept cashless payment.