finance
Accelerating Inclusion: How GCash is leveling the playing field for women through responsive digital financial tools
Thursday, April 10, 2025
GCash—the Philippines’ leading finance super app and largest cashless ecosystem—reiterates its commitment to accelerate action, accelerate inclusion to advance women’s economic empowerment through tech and innovation.
Under the mission of “Finance For All,” GCash continues to seek ways to break barriers to inclusion, going beyond digital financial solutions to create a responsive digital economy where women can thrive.
GCash heeded the call of International Women’s Day (IWD) 2025, the global day celebrating women’s social, economic, cultural, and political achievements, as it further dedicated itself to strategies that advanced gender equality. In keeping with this year’s IWD theme, “Accelerate Action,” GCash upheld women’s month with its own thrust, “Accelerate Action, Accelerate Inclusion,” which focused on empowering women with tools to make better-informed financial decisions, invest in themselves and their future, and take control of their finances to achieve independence.
“At GCash, we don’t just celebrate women—we invest in their success. Women are leaders, innovators, and changemakers, and their resilience drives not just our company but entire communities forward. Through our initiatives, we are creating an ecosystem where women have the tools to thrive in and beyond their careers. When women rise, we all rise,” Martha Sazon, President & CEO of Mynt, the holding company of GCash shared.
The inclusion of women as key to nation-building
GCash remains aligned with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the institution behind the National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI) that sees financial inclusion as a pathway to sustainable and equitable national development.
In creating the NSFI 2022-2028 strategy in 2019, the BSP identified tactics for coordinating a whole-of-nation approach to inclusive growth and financial resilience for every Filipino. The BSP and GCash consequently saw the status of women emerge as a crucial indicator in areas relevant to the nation’s progress and well-being.
“This informed our belief that empowering women leads to uplifting communities, and this is why GCash has always set out to confront the barriers and biases existing on both individual and systemic levels,” shared Sazon.
Empowerment through effective access
The lack of access to financial institutions has been reported as a fundamental systemic barrier, where account ownership is a core indicator of financial inclusion. According to the 2021 BSP’s Financial Inclusion Survey, seven in 10 adult Filipinos were categorized as financially excluded. The survey also identified the Philippines’ underserved sectors: the agriculture sector; the labor sector; women-owned and women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs); and the youth.
GCash has helped confront this barrier by accommodating the lack of identification documents, credit history, and other documentation often required by traditional financial institutions granting access to basic financial services. Using tech as both a democratization and a tool for good, the fintech leader has opted to use alternative data based on a user’s digital footprint, thus modernizing and improving the accessibility of financial solutions.
GCash ensures that its products—from saving and payment transfers to investing and getting insured—are flexible and responsive, capable of meeting specific needs and tailoring services wherever necessary. This has paved the way not only for widespread but also effective access. Five out of 10 registered GCash users are women who now have access to an e-wallet and a broader financial ecosystem; five out of 10 GSave users are women, with the majority residing outside Metro Manila.
In addition, women now have greater access to holistic protection. Seven out of 10 GInsure users are women, now safeguarded by diverse insurance products like coverage policies for life, health, business, car, and more. By offering one of the lowest premiums in the Philippine market, GCash has also transformed the insurance landscape with GInsure, making insurance affordable and attainable.
A focus on women’s economic empowerment
To drive equality and inclusion even further, GCash aims to innovate further and expand its digital financial ecosystem. This agenda focuses on women-led MSMEs and the leveraging of private-public partnerships to guarantee an intersectional approach.
Offering support to address the unique challenges faced by women, GCash has already disbursed more than PhP 186 billion worth of loans to over 6.9 million Filipinos, including those from grassroots sectors (such as sari-sari store owners, public market vendors, and farmers).
Providing fair and inclusive loans, once inaccessible to the vast majority, is only one way GCash levels the playing field. The company has gone on to successfully facilitate women’s access to capital and assets, with six out of 10 GLoan users being women. This is determined through the in-house credit scoring model of GCash, GScore, which uses transactional behavior as a proxy for measuring a user’s creditworthiness and has ultimately changed the landscape of microlending.
GCash further ensures that initiatives to promote women’s economic empowerment are active throughout the year. Using a multi-sectoral approach to projects, GCash widens its reach and strengthens its impact by collaborating with local government units, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, and more.
“Having long pursued meaningful partnerships to bring tech for good to more unbanked and underserved sectors, our experience at GCash has taught us that collaboration is the key to advancing gender equality,” said Sazon. “However, if we maintain our current pace, per the World Economic Forum, we stand to achieve full gender equality only in the year 2158. We at GCash feel the urgency now more than ever—and we know the only way we can move the needle and advance equality is if more of us work together.”
GCash intends to build on its progress to advance gender-inclusive finance and guarantee its sustainability beyond 2025. Staying true to its pursuit of “Finance For All,” GCash’s pact for the future remains grounded in accelerating the inclusion of women in marginalized, vulnerable sectors—thus ensuring that no one is left behind in the journey toward financial empowerment.
