Paywatch Philippines looks to roll out more services

FINTECH COMPANY Paywatch could roll out more services in the Philippines amid growing adoption of its earned wage access (EWA) tool.

Rowell O. del Fierro, country manager of Paywatch Philippines, said the company already offers tools like EWA, bills payment, insurance, and rewards.

“What’s on my wish list and what we’re working on would be wealth management products like high-yield savings accounts,” he told reporters on Thursday.

“It is not necessarily an investment because it needs to be very, very safe,” he added.

With this tool, he said, employees will be able to set aside money and put it in high-yield interest savings accounts for personal use.

“The other one that I am keen to work with is addressing mobility,” he said, adding that they want to allow employees to use their Paywatch credits to pay for their bookings on ride-hailing firms’ platforms.

“We are currently working on implementing these features. Whatever kind of important gap, we want to be able to do that,” he said. “That’s going to be this year. This year, I am working on the wealth management part of it.”

In the Philippines, most of Paywatch’s partners are in the information technology and business process management sector.

“That is just because of the sheer size of the industry. My largest customer has over 50,000 employees from Ilocos to Mindanao,” he said. “The next big sector is manufacturing.”

“These are bigger pools of people. One of our earlier launches was a canning factory in Mindanao… Metro Manila is still the biggest, I guess, but I really wish to have more Philippine Economic Zone Authority companies.”

The company’s user base in the Philippines is at about 100,000 employees from 70 companies, which it targets to increase in the next 12 months. — Justine Irish D. Tabile