Globe Telecom Inc. mobile wallet unit GCash has waived the QRPH transaction fees or merchant discount rates for micro-merchants who use the scan-to-pay service until yearend.
GCash said the 1.5 percent transaction fee is waived up to P100,000 in gross sales and the micro-merchants have access to an increased wallet limit of up to P500,000 per month.
“For GCash, making this service free means micro-entrepreneurs can earn a little extra for their families through safe cashless transactions. We are committed to working with our micro-entrepreneurs to achieve their business goals in the digital economy,” said Ren-Ren Reyes, president and chief executive officer of G-Xchange Inc., the mobile wallet operator of GCash.
Micro-merchants are those with businesses that are smaller in scale, such as sari-sari store owners, public market vendors and online sellers.
To date, GCash has 845,000 small-scale community merchants with various digital financial solutions.
In a related development, Globe has built 542 new cell sites and upgraded 5,087 mobile sites to Long Term Evolution across the country in the first half of the year.
Globe said it has also deployed approximately 148,000 fiber-to-the-home lines as of June, lower than in the same period last year as it continues to optimize its existing fiber inventory.
From January to June, Globe invested P37.7 billion in capital expenditure primarily for infrastructure development. That figure is expected to increase to P71.5 billion or $1.3 billion by yearend, Globe said.
A significant 90 percent of this budget supports growing data requirements of Filipinos for learning, earning and leisure activities, it added.
“We employ a targeted way of prioritizing network rollouts and optimizations in areas that matter, hence, we are able to sustain our most reliable network. We also believe that network reliability — a metric that is difficult to achieve — is more important than just speed because, on a small screen, there’s just so much that higher speeds can deliver in terms of improving the actual perceptible experience,” said Darius Delgado, head of Globe Consumer mobile business.
