PayMaya eyes up to $130 million fresh funds

MANILA, Philippines — Voyager Innovations Inc. is planning to raise more funds to support PayMaya Philippines’ bid to outdo rival GCash.

PLDT chairman and CEO Manuel V. Pangilinan said there is an ongoing fundraising exercise for PayMaya.

“There are plans for them to raise funding. It’s part of the overall program they have in raising money between now and 2023. There are warrants still unexercised to the extent of $55 million. Those are likely to be exercised by the existing warrant holders including PLDT,” Pangilinan said.

“But on top of that, there are new funds that need to be raised to at least to $120 million to $130 million to fund the programs all the way up to 2023,” he said.

Pangilinan admitted that mobile wallet GCash, operated by Globe Fintech Innovations Inc., has done better than PayMaya despite the latter’s “very good” 2020.

“But GCash did much better than they did. And so everybody is saying why can’t you do better? So there’s some catching up to do that PayMaya has got to perform better in 2021 and that would require further funding beyond the $120 million to $130 million range, which includes by the way the $55 million of warrants,” he said.

As of end-2020, PayMaya has over 28 million registered customers and more than 116,000 merchant partners nationwide.

Voyager stakeholders that include telecommunications giant PLDT, global investment firm KKR, China’s internet value-added services provider Tencent, World Bank Group member IFC, and the IFC Emerging Asia Fund in April last year committed to infuse up to $120 million in new funding to support PayMaya Philippines’ rapid growth.

In 2018, KKR, Tencent, IFC and IFC Emerging Asia Fund made initial investments totaling $215 million to Voyager to support the company and its strategy to provide greater access to digital financial services across the Philippines through PayMaya.

Pangilinan said PayMaya Philippines is seen breaking even by 2023, and profitable by 2024.

“It is likely though that if we pushed our foot to the pedal this year as that’s the mandate given to PayMaya, then I think we will see bigger losses in 2021, but that should bring us more certainty towards achieving our targets of break even by 2023 and profitable by 2024,” he said.

PayMaya is an end-to-end digital payments ecosystem enabler in the country with platforms and services that cuts across consumers, merchants and government.