Philippine-based fintech superapp GCash has teamed up with agritech startup Mayani to provide local farmers and fisherfolk with access to a financial platform that will support their needs, according to an announcement.
The two tech players teamed-up with a joint mandate to create the Philippines’ largest agri- credit movement to bank the rural unbanked.
GCash and Mayani will leverage the latter’s supply chain data to underwrite and jointly facilitate loans for organized farmers and fisherfolks needing a production lifeline to provide them quality inputs.
Mayani intends to integrate its end-to-end proprietary tech stack with GCash’s to index on their lending balance sheet, quantum reach, and loan approval to e-wallet disbursement infrastructure.
“By leveraging on modern technology’s financial transformation, agriculture, which is one of the most important industries of our nation, can experience rapid growth and sustainability,” said Tony Isidro, President and CEO of Fuse Lending, the licensed lending arm of Mynt, the parent company of GCash.
Agriculture is considered to be a crucial economic backbone of the Philippines, with almost 60% of the nation’s poor employed in the sector’s agriculture, forestry, fishing, and aquaculture industries, according to the World Bank in 2023.
Despite it being the primary economic activity in rural Philippines, the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas cited in 2018 that the credit gap for the sector sits at over 360 billion pesos ($6.3 billion), highlighting fundamental binding constraints that hamper adequate financing to fuel the sector’s peak potential.
“By situating any loan transaction within a trade and supply chain context, I think we are able to finally crack the code towards making our farmers and fisherfolks bankable, credit-worthy, and financially empowered,” said the Co-Founder of CEO of Mayani JT Solis.
Established in 2019, Mayani has a grassroots network of over 144,000 organized small farmers and fisherfolks across seven regions of the Philippines, stretching from the northern agri-corridors of Ilocos region up to the fishing islands and islets of Mimaropa region.
Its digital agri-fisheries ecosystem, initially funded through grants from ADB and JICA, currently operates three value-creation lines: Mayani Farm Direct for market linkage, Mayani Agri-Inputs for agricultural inputs distribution, and Mayani Fin-Assist for production financing.
In the middle of last year, Mayani closed a $1.7 million seed funding led by agrifoodtech venture capital firm AgFunder, along with other key backers Atlas Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Accelerating Asia, and Ocean Impact Organisation.
