GCash’s parent company just cleared the last major regulatory hurdle standing between it and the Philippine Stock Exchange — and in doing so, it quietly rewrote a rule that every large Philippine tech company weighing a future listing will now be measuring itself against.
The Securities and Exchange Commission approved Mynt Inc.’s P92.32-billion initial public offering earlier this month, clearing the way for what’s set to be the country’s biggest-ever share sale. The offer covers up to 1.61 billion primary shares priced at up to P10 apiece, alongside 6.42 billion shares from a selling shareholder and an overallotment option of 1.20 billion shares. Trading is targeted to begin October 20 on the PSE’s main board under the ticker GCASH, with the offer period running October 6 to 12 and pricing expected around October 1.
A New Rule, Built for Companies This Size
The approval itself is routine in structure but genuinely unusual in substance: Mynt is the first company to use the SEC’s newly created lower public-float allowance for exceptionally large issuers, adopted this year under Memorandum Circular 11. Where Philippine listing rules normally require a company to float at least 15% of its shares to the public, the circular lets an issuer whose expected market capitalization clears P200 billion float as little as 12%. Mynt’s projected valuation on listing — P668.96 billion — sits well past that threshold, and the SEC signed off on the reduced float rather than forcing the company to sell a larger stake than its own board wanted.
That’s not a technicality. A standard 15% float on a company this size would have meant selling billions of pesos more in shares than Mynt and its backers — Globe Telecom and Ant Group among them — apparently wanted to part with this early. The lower-float carve-out effectively tells any future Philippine tech company approaching a similar scale that the SEC has built a real, usable path to going public without diluting founders and early backers as heavily as the old rule required. If proceeds from the primary offering, expected around P14.95 billion before the overallotment, go where Mynt says they will — digital financial services expansion and product development — this becomes a test case for whether a lighter-float mega-IPO can still deliver a healthy, liquid trading market once shares actually start changing hands.
The Price Isn’t Settled Yet
What’s still genuinely unresolved is what investors will actually pay. The prospectus caps the offer at P10 a share, but BDO Capital & Investment Corp. president Eduardo Francisco told reporters this week that the real settlement price is likely to land lower — somewhere between P7.50 and P8.50. “My suspicion is if they lower the price to, let’s say, P7.50 to P8.50, I think there’s a deal to be done,” Francisco said, framing the discount as necessary to bring in investors who considered the full P10 ask too rich. Even at that reduced range, gross proceeds would still land between roughly P69.2 billion and P78.5 billion — comfortably clearing Monde Nissin’s 2021 record of P55.89 billion as the largest Philippine IPO on record, price cut notwithstanding.
The underwriting bench reflects how much international interest this deal is drawing regardless of where it prices: BPI Capital and BDO Capital are running the domestic side as lead underwriters and joint bookrunners, while Jefferies Singapore, CLSA, and HSBC Singapore handle international bookrunning, with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities, and UBS AG Singapore coordinating globally. That’s a genuinely global syndicate for a Philippine deal — a signal that GCash’s IPO is being treated less as a domestic retail float and more as a regional fintech listing that happens to be denominated in pesos.
Whether the pricing debate resolves toward P10 or toward Francisco’s lower range in the next few weeks will say a lot about how international capital is actually pricing Philippine fintech risk right now, independent of how bullish local retail sentiment tends to run around a household-name brand like GCash.
The stakes extend beyond Mynt itself. Analysts covering the Philippine market have already floated the idea that a well-received GCash debut could pull other digital-economy companies toward the PSE that have so far preferred to stay private or list abroad — precisely the dynamic regulators were betting on when they wrote the lower-float rule in the first place. A messy or underwhelming debut would do the opposite, reinforcing the long-standing complaint from local tech founders that the PSE is a poor fit for high-growth companies compared to a Nasdaq or Hong Kong listing. Either outcome will shape how the next wave of Philippine unicorns think about where — and whether — to go public at all.
What Founders Should Watch Next
Two things are worth tracking closely between now and October 20, beyond just whether the deal gets done. First, watch where the final price actually lands relative to Francisco’s P7.50-P8.50 range — a clean settlement near the top of that band would signal real institutional confidence in Philippine fintech valuations heading into Maya’s own long-rumored listing, while a price that slips further would suggest investors are discounting the sector more broadly, not just this one deal. Second, and more structurally important for any founder building toward a future exit: the lower public-float mechanism Mynt just used is now a live precedent, not a theoretical rule. Any Philippine startup with a realistic shot at a P200-billion-plus valuation now has a documented path to list without giving up the same chunk of the company a mid-sized issuer would have to. That’s a genuine, usable data point for cap-table planning years before an actual IPO conversation starts — worth understanding now, not scrambling to learn when your own board first raises the idea.
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