How Gokongwei and Tyme are gunning for Philippines’ digibank crown

This is the second installment of a two-part series on Tyme Group. Read the first part here.

GoTyme Bank, a joint venture between Singapore-based – but Africa-born – Tyme Group and Philippine conglomerate Gokongwei Group, is tapping into the underbanked segments of the Philippines.

This includes the fewer than 3% of Filipinos who have access to credit cards, insurance, and equity investments, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises often overlooked by traditional banks focused on serving their large corporate clients.

TymeBank, the group’s digital bank in South Africa, found success by signing customers up through in-store kiosks stationed in outlets of a large supermarket chain. It’s among the top five most downloaded finance apps in the country.

The group is now looking to do the same in the Philippines with GoTyme.

Its partnership with the Gokongwei Group, which owns the flagship conglomerate JG Summit, is a key part of the equation.

JG Summit currently has a market cap of nearly US$5 billion and operates budget airline Cebu Pacific, property developer Robinsons Land Corporation, and F&B company Universal Robina Corporation, to name a few.

With more than 4,000 consumer-facing outlets across the Philippines, the Gokongwei Group provides a sizable ecosystem for GoTyme to tap.

For example, it locates banking kiosks that can issue Visa debit cards on the spot in the various retail outlets belonging to JG Summit’s Robinsons Retail Holdings, just as TymeBank had done in supermarkets in South Africa. Robinsons Retail Holdings owns over 2,300 retail points, including supermarkets, department stores, and drugstores.

GoTyme currently has around 290 kiosks deployed across the Philippines and plans to have 450 in operation by the end of 2023.

In a September 2022 interview, GoTyme co-CEO Albert Tinio noted that Filipinos “are very much social,” adding that the best way to introduce a new concept to them was to have both a “physical and digital” presence.

GoTyme co-CEO Albert Tinio / Photo credit: GoTyme

“You make them go digital but you guide them through it. That’s why there are ambassadors with our kiosks so that if you have any questions, they will be there,” the CEO said.

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