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Lokesh Choudhary · · 2 min readAs Maya’s revenue grows, its digital bank bet deepens losses
Maya, a digital bank based in the Philippines, reported a revenue of US$127 million in 2022, an increase of about 34.9% compared to 2021, according to its audited financial statements.
Despite a sharp rise in revenues mainly due to sales of airtime credits, the bank reported a significant loss of US$156 million, reflecting an uptick of roughly 45.6% from 2021.
Originally just a payments app, Maya was rebranded from PayMaya and has transformed into a digital bank. It acquired a banking license in late 2021 and then launched its banking services in April 2022. Now it’s known for its competitive promotional savings and interest rates.
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A Maya spokesperson told Tech in Asia that the increased expenses in 2022 were related to the setting up of the digital bank.
According to Statista, in 2020, PayMaya held a 42% market share for mobile wallet apps in the Philippines, second only to GCash, which commanded a market share of 49.4%.
Maya’s employee expenses rose to US$50 million in 2022 from US$34.8 million in 2021. Earlier this year, an allegation of widespread company-wide redundancies surfaced.
An employee said in a viral LinkedIn post that the firm had unlawfully withheld her final pay and certificate of employment, among other essential documents.
However, a company spokesperson said that the incident of withholding documents for one employee was a case of miscommunication and that all the necessary documents have been released.
“We reviewed our organization in early 2023 and reallocated some of our resources, resulting in less than 50 people leaving the organization out of our overall strength of over 1,000 employees,” the spokesperson said to Tech in Asia.
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“Sale of airtime load” continued to be the primary revenue source for the company.
In 2022, revenue from “sale of airtime load” reached US$98.4 million, making up 77.5% of the total and representing a substantial increase from the approximately US$65.5 million logged in 2021.
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Lending fees could amount to a significant revenue stream in the Philippines-based digibank’s future.
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