Paymaya, the Concept

What is Paymaya? I'd like to try and provide a conceptual answer to that question. As a proud member of Gen X (1965-1979), I consider my generation to be the last that provides conceptual answers to questions. Not to generalize too much, but it certainly seems like, to me at least, that when you ask a millennial (Gen. Y 1980-1994) a question of what something is, he/she will generally reply not with what it is, but rather with what it can do.

What is Paymaya?
Gen Y answer: You can use it to pay for things at any establishment that accepts Paymaya.

Ask a Gen Z'er (1995-2015) the same question on the other hand, and you are bound to get the most basic of replies.

What is Paymaya? Gen Z answer: App siya.

If you're lucky and the Gen Z'er hasn't gone back to playing Mobile Legends, you might get snippets of how to get the App to work, but rarely, it seems, information about what the app is, in concept.

 I haven't figured out why there seems to be this difference across generations. And mind you, I am definitely  not implying that there is a difference in intelligence. Your average Gen Z'er for instance, has so much information in his brain that I suspect he answers the question like that precisely because he couldn't decide where to start and thus ended up defaulting to "app sya.."

I guess it is somewhat related to the differences in the way life presented itself to these different generations, which in turn, led to differences in how we view the world and process and thus exchange information. But exactly how, I don't know. For all I know, it is perhaps not a difference in generations but a difference in age. Maybe answering questions in conceptual terms is something that kicks in at say, 36 years of age. Maybe this is the only reason Gens Y and Z still don't seem to answer questions in conceptual terms, I don't know. So, for today at least, I am sticking to talking about Paymaya.

 At its core, Paymaya is a digital wallet which allows money transfers to other Paymaya users. If you are a Paymaya user, you can convert your cash into digital form and store it as credits on the Paymaya app which resides on your phone. From this app you can then send credits to other Paymaya users, who can either choose to keep them as credits on their phone or exchange them back into hard currency.

Sample of QR Code

In its purest form, a Paymaya payment from a user to a commercial establishment is essentially such a money transfer. The commercial establishment is also a Paymaya account-holder, although they have a business account instead of a personal one (a minor detail for purposes of our discussion) and when you pay them you are essentially sending money from your account to theirs. The way you tell your app that it is their account you want to send money to (and not some other establishment's) is by inputing their account number (often a cellphone number) into your app - and the shortcut to this is scanning their unique QR code.

That's it. At its core that's what Paymaya (and GCash for that matter) is.

 But like any commercial products, there are of course, bells and whistles. It's these bells and whistles that often make things seem more complicated than they really are - especially if we delve into the bells and whistles before taking the time to understand the central concept behind the product.

For a digital wallet to really be useful in everyday life, it must also serve as a payment solution. That is, there must be an easy way for you to pay for things in everyday life with credits from your digital wallet. With Paymaya for instance, the basic way to pay is to send money from your account to the account of the commercial establishment from which you purchased something. But as we've mentioned before, this can only be done if the commercial establishment or vendor is also a Paymaya account-holder. To make Paymaya more useful, the people behind it needed to give users the ability to pay even vendors who were not Paymaya account-holders. Enter the Paymaya debit card. The Paymaya debit card is an add-on to the basic Paymaya account. You can easily buy one from Paymaya or its distributors, and it will be accepted anywhere that VISA or Mastercard is accepted (it's your choice which one to have, or both if you buy multiple cards.) You can then link the card/s to your account and your payments will flow as digital credits on your phone, through the debit card, to the vendor who accepts either VISA or Mastercard. Each debit card costs around P200 (I'm not sure exactly) and you can link more than one card.

 Each Paymaya account also has a virtual card which you can choose to activate. With a virtual card you have card details (i.e. card number, expiry date, security code) but no physical card. The virtual card will be powered by either VISA or Mastercard. The user doesn't get to choose which of the two as this depends, I believe, on the network his phone is on. The advantage of the virtual card is that it's free. The disadvantage is that while it can be used for online purchases, most brick-and-mortar establishments will require a physical card. So in short, if you expect to be using your Paymaya account purely for online payments, then a virtual card is sufficient; but to be able to use your Paymaya accounts in physical establishments (especially for non-Paymaya vendors), you will need to buy a physical Paymaya debit card and link it to your account. Once you have a physical card, then the virtual card becomes redundant and unnecessary, though you are perfectly free to keep using it of course.

I should also add that while setting up the most basic Paymaya account takes, quite literally, less than five minutes, once you want a card - be it a virtual or physical card - you will need to verify your account by sending in more identification information. To make sure you are a living, breathing person, Paymaya will also require you to take a video selfie (I kid you not) at this stage. Video selfie, not photo selfie. All in all, these are still manageable minor inconveniences in exchange for a fairly complete digital-wallet-and-payment system.

As a way to recap the things we've gone through, let's take a look at a real world situation that I personally find interesting.

When you go to McDonald's and one of its NXTGEN ordering kiosks, you will almost always see "Paymaya" prominently displayed on the payment interface of the kiosk. And yet, McDonald's is actually not a Paymaya vendor in the truest sense of the word - at least not currently, and at least not in the way I see it. For me, a "true" Paymaya vendor lets you send money from your Paymaya account into theirs, and they have a QR code to identify their account - and at this point in time McDonald's does not. While it is true that the McDonald's kiosks allow you to pay using a Paymaya debit card, it also allows all other debit/credit cards that use the VISA/Mastercard systems. So, the more correct description, currently, is that McDonald's accepts all VISA/Mastercard cards, and that includes those that are linked to / funded by Paymaya accounts. So, I find it very interesting why the Paymaya logo is so prominently displayed at those kiosks, perhaps McDonald's and Paymaya have grand plans that just haven't been launched yet.

UPDATE December 12, 2019 : So, indeed, the scan-QR-to-pay facility has been enabled in McDonald's stores. I thought it was probably coming given how prominently the Paymaya logo had been displayed on the payment terminals attached to the ordering kiosks -

Another question I used to have is why these telecommunications companies like Globe and Smart ventured into the payments space. At first glance it seems like a business quite different from their core businesses of providing telecommunications services. I was even more intrigued when I learned that the payment services did not even require you to use the sister-company as your telecom provider - i.e. you can open a Paymaya account with a Globe number and a GCash account with a Smart number. Then at some point I realized that if these telecommunications companies can nudge us towards a world where our wallets come to reside within  our phones, and thus make our phones even more indispensable parts of our lives, then it can only mean good things for them over the long haul because their market expands. It's true marketing in a way - to create sales and revenues not by pushing things down consumers' throats but by creating a world where consumers have greater and greater need, whether real or imagined, for the core products you provide. Pretty cool actually.