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Launched by his predecessor at Globe Telecom, Gerry Ablaza, to a target market that was lukewarm at best and skeptical at worst, Cu saw in it a solution to a long-standing national issue: the lack of financial inclusion.
“The banks were just sticking to their knitting,” he said, noting how traditional financial institutions overlooked vast segments of the population.
GCash — now a $5-billion company, thanks to the entry of MUFG and Mitsubishi as equity investors last year — was built to serve these underserved groups.
Without a novel way of circumventing traditional and systemic roadblocks in the conservative banking system, Cu said “the segments that GCash was aimed to serve were forever excluded financially.”
The outgoing Globe CEO’s strategy was clear from the start — build something that could bring “unbanked” Filipinos into the formal financial system.
Betting on smartphones before they took off
Cu understood that SMS and USSD—GCash’s original formats—were not scalable. Even as early as 2008, he anticipated the app era.
“In my mind at that point already, it had to be an app experience,” he said, years before smartphones reached mass adoption in the Philippines.
The decision to shift from SMS to an app was part of a broader bet: that smartphone penetration would eventually reach a tipping point. Cu set that threshold at 70 percent and waited.
“Around 2015 or 2016, we restarted the company. I put real management in it. People who I thought could do it for the long term,” he said.
Bringing in a global partner
By 2016, Cu saw the need to modernize GCash’s backend.
“Our platform was kind of obsolete,” he said.
The answer came through a partnership with Ant Financial, the fintech arm of Alibaba. Ant brought more than just capital—it offered a scalable platform, deep experience, and a sophisticated risk engine.
“Their platform was already running 600 million accounts,” Cu said. “We only had three or four million, so I thought, siguro naman kaya.”
The platform switch came just in time. By mid-2020, during the early stages of the COVID-19 lockdowns, GCash completed its transition. This was achieved while most team members were in a work-from-home environment.
The result was a fintech platform that was more stable and had the ability to handle high transaction volumes.
Pandemic-driven surge found GCash ready
GCash was already growing, but the pandemic pushed its trajectory into a sharp upward slope. Was that luck or skill?
“I think it’s a little bit of both,” Cu said. “The skill part was because we were ready. The luck part was the pandemic.”
He credits the Alipay platform and GCash’s broader feature set for earning user trust when Filipinos were suddenly forced to rely on digital services amid government-imposed quarantines and mobility restrictions.
Scaling financial services
But Cu believes financial inclusion goes beyond just payments. For him, it means offering the same services that “banked” Filipinos enjoy—savings, investments, insurance, and even credit.
“The app also gives you a financial identity through the credit score,” Cu said.
Amid this ever growing menu of services, he emphasized GCash’s role as a partner, not a competitor, to banks.
“We serve the bottom to the top… we help them acquire deposits, acquire accounts,” he said, citing as example GCash’s its partnership with CIMB which was able to acquire millions of accounts digitally
“Practically all of their base was acquired through GCash,” Cu noted.
Lending and the future of growth
Despite its size, Cu sees more room for expansion, especially in lending.
“We’ve only disbursed P155 billion. The informal sector is still much bigger than that,” he said.
To support growth, GCash partnered with MUFG, and Cu hinted at securitization efforts to free up capital and continue scaling.
More importantly, the company doesn’t plan to become a bank even if its current valuation of $5 billion makes it one of the largest private financial institutions in the country in terms of stockholders’ equity.
“We’re a conduit. We’re a marketplace. We’re a partner to the banks,” he said.
OFWs and regional expansion
Cu — who will remain GCash chair after he relinquishes his CEO post at Globe on April 22, 2025 — is focused on addressing the needs of Filipinos overseas, both workers who remit dollars home and travelers.
“Why not give them more control?” he asked, referring to tools that allow OFWs to pay bills directly or use QR codes from abroad.
GCash has enabled cross-border QR payments via Alipay’s global merchant network.
“There are 80 million merchants in China on Alipay,” Cu said, noting that the same system can be replicated in the Philippines. “It’s very significant.”
Internal culture, external threats
Asked whether he’ll be more involved with GCash following his formal transition, Cu stressed that his role will remain “non-executive”.
“I give them advice, and they rely on my insights,” he said.
But it’s clear that his influence remains deeply embedded because as much as 90 percent of GCash’s senior management came from Globe.
On threats that he sees on the horizon, Cu pointed to sophisticated scams and social engineering as top concerns.
“If people lose trust in the system, that’s the biggest threat,” he said, and suggested that a shift away from SMS as a communication channel may be necessary in the long term.
Going public and the road ahead
Cu said that the much awaited initial public offering of GCash will happen for sure, but the exact timing remains to be seen.
“It’s on our radar… but we have the liberty of time,” he said, adding that GCash is profitable and generating substantial amounts of cash for its parent Ayala conglomerate—a rarity among Southeast Asia’s fintechs.
With GCash’s scale and profitability, Cu sees continued growth for the fintech behemoth, as well as for the telco he will leave behind — new ventures, such as data centers through a joint venture with STT GDC.
“We are making a very big bet,” he said, calling it a long-gestation project with deep infrastructure needs.
Even as he steps back from Globe operationally, Cu will remain closely tied to GCash’s ongoing evolution for years to come.
“There’s still so much more to be done,” he said.
Senior Reporter
