Getting paid by Filipino customers without a Philippine entity

Wallets sit on shared public rails

The Philippines built interoperable infrastructure first and let private wallets compete on top of it, rather than backing a single dominant platform. Under the National Retail Payment System, InstaPay handles real-time lower-value transfers with a per-transaction limit, while PESONet handles larger batch payments such as payroll, supplier payments and government disbursements. Both are automated clearing houses, and together they moved tens of trillions of pesos annually with transaction counts growing sharply year on year. QR Ph is the national QR standard layered on top, giving every merchant one code that any participating wallet or bank app can pay. Because the rails are open, a GCash user can pay a Maya merchant or send to a bank account without a card network being involved. That architecture is the reason two large wallets coexist instead of one winning.

• Use InstaPay for real-time retail payments and PESONet for batch B2B or disbursement flows.
• Support QR Ph if you take payments in person, so one code serves every wallet.
• Remember that wallet-to-wallet transfers inside the same wallet never touch the public rails.
• Check whether your provider gives you wallet access, rail access, or both.

GCash and Maya: coverage, not either-or

GCash is the largest wallet in the Philippines by a wide margin, with registered users in the tens of millions and an active base that covers most of the digitally active adult population. It operates as a super-app spanning transfers, bill payment, QR merchant payments, savings, credit and insurance, and it is licensed by the central bank as an electronic money issuer. Maya, formerly PayMaya, is the second wallet and operates with a digital bank licence; it is a major merchant acquirer in its own right. The two serve overlapping but distinct demographics and both are growing, so the right answer for a merchant is almost always to support both. The strategic risk is concentration: GCash has suffered outages that left merchants unable to accept payments for hours, which is a good argument for having a second wallet and a card rail live at the same time.

• Support GCash and Maya together rather than choosing between them.
• Keep a card rail live as a fallback for wallet outages.
• Expect wallet acceptance to be priced differently from account-to-account transfers.
• Check whether your provider bundles both wallets with cards and bank transfers at a better combined price.

How a foreign merchant gets access

Direct participation in InstaPay and PESONet is limited to banks and to electronic money issuers licensed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, with minimum capital requirements and a licensing timeline that runs well over a year. That route is unrealistic for most foreign merchants. The practical route is a licensed local payment provider: PayMongo, Xendit Philippines, DragonPay, Paynamics and similar firms provide wallet, card and bank transfer acceptance through one integration, and regional cross-border providers do the same for merchants without a Philippine presence. What you are buying is their licence and their settlement relationship. Ask which licensed entity acquires your transactions, whether the provider onboards your country of incorporation, and whether you get access to the wallets, the bank rails, or only to one of the two. A provider that offers GCash but not InstaPay is giving you a partial stack.

• Ask which BSP-licensed entity acquires your transactions and settles to you.
• Confirm in writing that your country of incorporation and industry are accepted.
• Ask whether the integration includes wallets, cards, and the InstaPay and PESONet rails.
• Ask for the KYC document list before your team commits to a build timeline.

Cash over the counter still matters

Card penetration in the Philippines is relatively low outside urban and higher-income segments, and a meaningful share of e-commerce still settles in cash. Over-the-counter payment networks such as Bayad and Palawan Pawnshop let a buyer generate a reference online and pay in cash at a branch or agent location, while cash on delivery remains common for e-commerce. These behave like every other voucher rail: the order is pending until someone physically pays, references expire, and a proportion of generated references are never settled. Cash also introduces logistics and returns risk that you do not have with a wallet payment. The trade-off is coverage: for a buyer with a phone but no bank account and no wallet balance, an over-the-counter network is often the only way to buy from you at all.

• Add over-the-counter cash once abandonment data shows a cash-preferring segment.
• Set expiry windows and reminder sequences for every cash reference you generate.
• Track the ratio of references generated to references actually paid.
• Plan a manual credit path, since a cash payment cannot be reversed through the rail.

Costs, settlement and what to ask

Wallet acceptance, account-to-account transfers and card acceptance are priced differently, and the headline percentage is only part of what you pay. Ask separately about the transaction fee per method, any fixed per-transaction charge, the FX spread applied when pesos are converted to your settlement currency, a settlement or payout fee, a refund fee, a chargeback fee on cards, a monthly minimum, any setup fee, and whether a rolling reserve applies to your category. Ask how failed and abandoned transactions are billed, and specifically how unpaid cash references are handled. Public pricing is only a first filter. Actual pricing changes with country, industry, volume, settlement currency, integration method and contract terms. Confirm against the provider's official pricing page or a written quote before you go live. Ask also whether refunds on wallet payments are supported at all, because some providers only collect.

• Ask for a method-by-method fee schedule rather than a single blended rate.
• Ask whether the quoted rate includes the FX margin or excludes it.
• Ask how abandoned cash references and failed wallet payments are billed.
• Ask for the payout calendar, the cut-off times, and the reserve release schedule.

A practical build order

Start with GCash and Maya together, because between them they cover the large majority of Filipino digital buyers and are what people expect to see at checkout. Add cards alongside them for higher ticket sizes, recurring billing, and as an outage fallback. Then add bank transfer via InstaPay for buyers who prefer to pay from a bank account and for larger payments where wallet limits bite. Add PESONet only if you have B2B or disbursement use cases. Finish with over-the-counter cash and cash on delivery if your category needs the coverage. Throughout, price and display in pesos, keep the checkout mobile-first, and measure approval rate by method, time to confirmation, unpaid reference rate, and the variance between expected and actual payout. Keep a written record of every payout variance you find, since patterns only emerge after several cycles.

• Launch GCash and Maya together, with cards as a fallback from day one.
• Price and display everything in pesos and optimise the checkout for mobile.
• Add InstaPay for bank-account buyers and larger payments.
• Measure unpaid reference rates and payout variance monthly before changing the mix.

Questions merchants ask

Public sources

• Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas - official portal
• GCash - business and MSME page
• PayMongo - Philippine payments provider
• Maya - official site