When news broke of telecommunications provider Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) buying 10 percent of ecommerce giant Rocket Internet, most of the ensuing local coverage was hyper-focused on outlining the terms of the deal.

PLDT would get 10 percent of Rocket Internet for a sticker price of US$445 million, which will give the company shares of the same class that RI has previously issued to other investors. The purchase would also grant PLDT one seat on Rocket Internet’s supervisory board of nine.

While it would be extreme to call this coverage short-sighted, it is a bit narrow in scope. A deal as big as this one affects the entire landscape of financial technology in the Philippines, which although nascent, is still a relatively small industry.

This idea is most apparent in homegrown fin-tech company VMoney, which provides a host of ecommerce solutions ranging in everything from point of sale systems to white-labeled debit cards. Their suite of solutions falls under direct competition with the products that Rocket Internet and PLDT intend to jointly create. According to the press release sent to Tech in Asia,

Concurrent with the investment, PLDT and Rocket will jointly develop mobile and online
payment technologies and services in emerging markets. The partnership will leverage PLDT’s experience and intellectual property in mobile payments and remittance platforms, together with Rocket’s global technology platform, to provide products and services for the ‘unbanked, uncarded and unconnected’ population in emerging markets.

As for a timeline, PLDT and Rocket Internet will begin to roll out these fin-tech products within the year.

See: How an entrepreneur with two failed ventures went on to clone Rocket Internet’s tech hub in Asia

Applauding the PLDT buy-in

Photo courtesy of VMoney.

Though not yet that well-known in the local and international tech scene, owing in part to CEO and co-founder Ralph Santos’s (pictured below) aversion to frills – you’d be hard-pressed to catch him at a startup schmoozing event – VMoney services some of the biggest brands in the country. Their client roster includes Guess, Mossimo, cd-r king, Vans, Gold’s Gym, Team Manila, Cold Stone Creamery, Mango, Agoda, and Samsung. Their partners include major banks like BPI and Security Bank, ecommerce platforms like DragonPay, and government institutions like the Department of Tourism.

Santos was ecstatic when he heard news of PLDT’s purchase. His reaction may surprise some, given that the joint partnership between PLDT and Rocket Internet is supposed to produce products that will eventually compete with VMoney’s lineup, but therein lies the kicker: PLDT and Rocket Internet, Santos says, have yet to create what VMoney already has.