From SMS-based remittance toolkit to super-app: Platformed finance and the case of GCash

This article examines fintech platforms’ strategies of development and growth through an analysis of the Philippines’ finance super app, GCash, home to over 90 million registered users and crucial in a country where poor rural infrastructure, weak institutions, and perceived barriers to financial account ownership have led to historically low financial inclusion. Drawing from a platform biography of GCash's development, alongside a walkthrough of its super app form, the study examines GCash as a platform, super app, and megacorp, tracing how GCash evolved from its SMS remittance-based foundations into a sprawling constellation of services. GCash not only extends access to financial services but also structures transactions and shapes the cultural and economic conditions of everyday exchange. We argue that GCash operates simultaneously as a catalog of digital transactions—revealing the interconnections among markets, persons, and technology—and as a financial infrastructure whose reach is structured by corporate conglomerates, state support, global capital, and digital architectures. These highlight the tensions at the heart of GCash: its promise of “finance for all” is entangled with its embedding in a megacorp and its reliance on partnerships with global capital. By foregrounding these tensions, the article situates GCash within broader dynamics of the super-appification of finance, underscoring how platform-led financial inclusion efforts are bound up with the consolidation of corporate power and the governance challenges of financialization in contexts of infrastructural weakness and economic precarity.