GCash's Mega-IPO Is Finally Happening—Because the PSE Lowered the Bar First
Mynt's board has authorised the country's most anticipated listing in years. The Philippine Stock Exchange, which managed just two IPOs in 2025, will be relieved. Whether retail investors should be is another question entirely.
On Wednesday, June 17, the Philippine fintech press finally got the headline it has been rehearsing since late 2023: Mynt Inc., the company behind GCash, announced that its board and shareholders had authorised the filing of a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a listing application with the Philippine Stock Exchange. The offering would sell 12% of the company's outstanding shares. Reports put the target valuation at $8 billion to $9 billion, with proceeds of $1 billion to $1.5 billion—enough to rival Monde Nissin's record-breaking 2021 debut.
PSE President Ramon Monzon has been talking about this listing the way a drowning man talks about a lifeboat. The exchange recorded only two IPOs in 2025—Top Line Business Development and Maynilad—missing its own target of six for the second straight year. For 2026, it is hoping for four, and Mynt is the marquee name on the list.
The firm shares will consist of both primary and secondary offers.
Read that line from the Ayala Corporation disclosure again. This is not purely a capital-raising exercise for growth. Insiders are coming to the window too.
That is not scandalous—it is what IPOs are for. But it does puncture the tidy narrative that GCash is listing because the business urgently needs public-market fuel. Globe Telecom already booked P6.1 billion in attributable equity earnings from Mynt in 2025, up 64% year on year. Fuse Financing, Mynt's lending arm, disbursed P362 billion in loans to 10.5 million borrowers. Q1 2026 attributable earnings to Globe hit P1.9 billion, more than double the prior quarter. The app is not gasping for air.
What changed is the plumbing.
For years, Mynt argued that the old 20% minimum public float would force an offering too large for the PSE to absorb at an $8 billion valuation—roughly $1.6 billion in stock, or the equivalent of ten days of total daily market turnover at current liquidity levels. Regulators listened. In February 2026, the SEC introduced a tiered float framework that allows exceptionally large issuers to list with as little as 12% public ownership. Mynt's planned 12% offering fits the new rules like a bespoke suit.
The company also executed a stock split, cutting par value from P1 to P0.03 to multiply outstanding shares and, in the words of one market analyst, "maximise retail liquidity." Translation: make the headline share price look affordable enough for the 94 million Filipinos who already have the app on their phones.
And therein lies the circular marketing genius.
GCash already runs GStocks PH, which let users subscribe to a recent Philippine IPO with orders oversubscribed by more than 200%. It is not hard to imagine Mynt's own listing becoming the ultimate reflexive trade: the wallet that taught millions of Filipinos to buy stocks will now ask them to buy stock in the wallet itself. Financial inclusion, meet financial inception.
The ownership table is equally instructive. Globe holds 35%. Ant International, Jack Ma's payments arm, holds 34%. Ayala Corporation holds 13%. MUFG Bank holds 8%. Warburg Pincus and Bow Wave hold the rest. This is less a homegrown startup story than a carefully balanced cap table of telco, Chinese fintech, conglomerate, and Japanese bank interests—all of whom have had years to decide whether the Philippines' dominant e-wallet was a strategic asset or a liquidity event waiting to happen.
Maya, the challenger with a BSP-licensed digital bank and its own dual-listing ambitions, will be watching closely. So will the 71 electronic money issuers and 303 payment-system operators the Bangko Sentral counted in 2025. The BSP lifted its moratorium on new EMI licences this year. GCash's IPO prospectus will inevitably describe a moat; the regulators are quietly widening the river.
None of this means the business is weak. GCash processes the lion's share of InstaPay traffic, powers tap-to-pay on Manila railways, and has pushed deep into lending, insurance, crypto, and wealth products for users overwhelmingly outside Metro Manila and in lower socioeconomic segments. That is a genuine platform. It is also a platform whose fastest-growing revenue lines—microloans, merchant fees, insurance policies sold by the hundred million—carry credit-cycle and regulatory risk that a payments-app valuation tends to smooth over.
The timing, as always, is "subject to market conditions," a phrase Mynt has been using since at least 2023. Conveniently, market conditions now include a stock exchange desperate for a win, a regulator that rewrote listing rules with one issuer in mind, and a user base trained to tap "buy" inside the same app that is about to sell them shares.
If GCash were listing because the Philippine capital market had matured into a credible home for world-class fintech, that would be worth celebrating. But the PSE did not attract Mynt by getting healthier. It attracted Mynt by agreeing to list less of it. That feels less like a coming-of-age moment for Philippine tech and more like a very well-timed exit ramp—built just wide enough for a P94-billion float, and just narrow enough that everyone already in the cap table keeps control.