MAYA

Back in 2013, the Philippines had a money problem. Most people owned a phone but not a bank account.

Orlando Vea, who had already helped build mobile giant Smart Communications, spun up Voyager Innovations inside telecom group PLDT. The first product was PayMaya, a prepaid digital wallet you could load with cash at a corner store.

Then came the big swing. In 2021 the company won one of the first digital banking licenses handed out by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and launched Maya Bank.

The wallet and the bank merged under one name in 2022. Maya.

Maya makes money the way most fintechs do. It takes a small cut of every payment that moves through its app.

Merchants pay to accept QR and card payments. Consumers park cash in a Maya wallet and now a Maya Bank savings account that pays high interest.

The bank lends that money out and earns on the credit. Add crypto trading, bill payments, and micro-investments, and Maya earns a little on almost everything a Filipino might do with money.

The trick is volume. Millions of tiny transactions add up fast.

The Maya app is the core, a single wallet for payments, QR, and bills. Maya Bank sits inside it with savings accounts, deposits, and credit.

A crypto feature lets users buy and sell tokens. Maya Business gives merchants tools to accept payments and track cash.

And a small-loan credit product lends to users the traditional banks always ignored.

The growth hack was cash and QR codes. Maya blanketed the Philippines with QR acceptance at tiny stores, market stalls, and tricycle stands.

It threw cashback promos at users to get them loading wallets. Then it used the bank license to offer savings rates the old banks could not touch, some running into double digits.

The pandemic did the rest. When people could not walk into a branch, a wallet on a phone became the branch.

Maya is not alone. GCash, backed by Ant Group and Globe Telecom, is the bigger wallet in the Philippines and got there first.

Winning users often means burning money on promos and cashback. Both giants are still chasing profit while spending hard to grab market share.

The other challenge is trust. Convincing millions of first-time users that money on a phone is as safe as cash under a mattress takes years.

Maya's backers read like a who's who of global money. American buyout giant KKR and China's Tencent are both in.

So is the International Finance Corporation, the private arm of the World Bank. Telecom parent PLDT anchors the whole thing.

In 2022 a $210 million round led by SIG Venture Capital pushed the valuation to roughly $1.4 billion, making Maya a Philippine tech unicorn.