The Philippine market’s fundamentals are quite similar to China’s early days. , while cellular subscription is 104 per 100 people in the country. China’s smartphone market took off whenĬheaper Chinese alternatives to the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy began to sprout Widening internet and mobile phone penetration, and rising incomes were also prerequisites. Mobile apps became a convenient way to transfer money and pay for goods and services. The size of the country and its population meant consumers had to contend with long lines in city branches and long journeys to those in the countryside.Ĭredit card usage was also low, partly because America’s Visa and Mastercard – and many other international firms – were banned in the Middle Kingdom. While the Philippines was slow to adopt mobile payments in the past, it’s likely reaching a tipping point, especially as Alibaba and Tencent export their expertise and technology here via their strategic tie-ups with GCash and PayMaya.Ĭhina was uniquely primed for mobile paymentsįor context, mobile payments leapfrogged in China because of The sum of those figures translates to just over 31% of the total population and this is how it compares to some of the Philippines’ neighbors:Ĭhina’s e-wallet success will be hard to replicate elsewhere, but there are many lessons that can be drawn from its experience. Stats on other players are hard to come by. If we go by industry players’ claims, here’s how many e-wallet users we have:Īs of February 2019 (bulk or 15 million of that number was recorded only in 2018) On top of that, only 1.3% of Filipino adults own electronic money accounts, according to the BSP’sīSP’s own data pegs e-wallet accounts in the country at about 12% of the adult population. The Philippines hasn’t come close to the dizzying adoption that China has seen (to be fair, though, probably no other country in the world has).Īs of 2018, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) earlier said.Ī poll by data insights company TheNerve confirmed that cash remains the preferred payment mode of Filipinos. For comparison, Apple Pay, which comes pre-installed on every iPhone, has only 127 million users globally. That covers almost the entire China population, and a chunk of those numbers came only in the past 5 years. The country’s e-wallet giants, Alibaba-backed Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat, have Mobile payments have become so ubiquitous that even In China, cash is considered almost dead. It may seem like a scene straight out of the Netflix show Can you imagine the day when cash is obsolete and Filipinos use only their mobile phones to pay for everything, even the most mundane stuff like a jeepney ride or street food?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |