Two months before Mynt, the parent company of GCash, is expected to price what would be the largest initial public offering in Philippine history, the company’s Chief Technology and Operations Officer used a public stage to say something that sounded more like a warning to her own engineers than a pitch to investors: don’t let the AI decide things it hasn’t earned the right to decide.
Speaking at the fifth GCash iGnite Innovation Summit, Pebbles Sy laid out what amounts to an internal doctrine for how a platform serving 94 million users is allowed to deploy artificial intelligence — in customer service, fraud detection, software development, and internal decision-making — without letting the technology outrun the trust it depends on. “As technology accelerates, trust has to move even faster,” she said, framing the entire talk around a deliberately unglamorous idea: AI at GCash’s scale is a governance problem before it is a product problem.
A Company That Cannot Afford to Get This Wrong
The timing is not incidental. Mynt filed a draft preliminary prospectus with the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission and the Philippine Stock Exchange in late June, targeting an offering of up to ₱92.3 billion — a deal that would eclipse Monde Nissin’s 2021 float as the country’s biggest-ever listing, with pricing expected around late September and a tentative Manila listing weeks later. A platform preparing to put its books, its fraud controls, and its governance in front of public-market scrutiny has a very different tolerance for AI systems that hallucinate a customer’s balance or wave through a fraudulent transfer than a company that answers to no one but itself.
Sy’s framing reflected that reality directly. “AI isn’t a silver bullet,” she said. “It’s a tool that requires smart governance, clean data, and strong human judgment.” Rather than treat every AI deployment the same way, she described a risk-tiered approach: an internal tool that summarizes notes gets one level of oversight, while a system making fraud-detection calls on real money gets a categorically stricter one. “Our teams need to know when to trust the output, when to challenge it, and when to step in,” she said — a line that puts accountability explicitly back on GCash’s own staff rather than on the model itself.
The Regulation Sitting Behind the Rhetoric
This isn’t abstract positioning. Sy’s remarks land a little over two months after BSP Circular No. 1213 took full effect on June 25, forcing every bank and e-wallet operator averaging more than ₱75 million in monthly online transactions — a threshold GCash clears many times over — to retire SMS and email one-time passwords for high-risk transactions in favor of biometric, behavioral, or passwordless authentication. BSP Deputy Governor Lyn Javier put the regulator’s reasoning plainly when the rule took effect: “The BSP is equally dedicated to promoting innovation in financial services as to protecting customers from new forms of fraud.” The circular, which implements part of the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act, also obliges covered institutions to run real-time fraud-detection systems capable of flagging suspicious transactions as they happen — precisely the kind of system Sy described AI being used for internally.
The stakes behind that mandate are real. Compliance-technology trackers that followed the circular’s rollout have pegged the Philippines’ digital fraud rate at roughly 13.4%, nearly triple the global average, with victims losing an average of ₱44,700 per incident. Those are the numbers a company the size of GCash is actually managing against, and they explain why Sy spent as much time on restraint as she did on capability. “We don’t trade speed for security,” she said. “They actually fuel each other when designed right.”
Purpose Over Novelty
The more pointed part of Sy’s talk was aimed at a familiar instinct in tech companies generally: shipping AI features because the technology is available, not because a customer actually asked for them. “The real test is simple,” she said. “Does this solve a real problem for everyday Filipinos in a simpler, safer way.” She summed up the philosophy in one line — “tech with a purpose, not just tech for tech’s sake” — and tied it to a development principle she called shifting left: building security and resilience into a product early in its design rather than bolting it on after launch. “Reliability is the customer experience,” she said, arguing that for a platform handling financial infrastructure for the large majority of the country’s adult population, uptime and predictability are themselves the product, not a technical footnote to it.
What Founders Should Watch Next
Sy’s remarks are worth reading as a preview of what BSP examiners and public-market analysts will expect from every fintech operating at scale in the Philippines, not just GCash. Founders building anything that touches payments, lending, or identity verification should treat risk-tiered AI governance — different oversight for a note-summarizer than for a fraud-detection model — as a compliance baseline they will eventually need to document for a regulator or an institutional investor, not a nice-to-have. It’s also worth watching how GCash’s public framing here interacts with its own IPO roadshow in the coming weeks: a company about to be judged by public shareholders on operational risk has a strong incentive to be seen getting AI governance right in public before it has to prove it under formal listing disclosure, and smaller PH fintechs will likely find themselves benchmarked against whatever standard GCash sets first.
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