Voyager Innovations (Maya)

Voyager Innovations is the technology company, formed in January 2013 as the digital innovations unit of PLDT and Smart Communications, behind Maya (formerly PayMaya) and Maya Bank. Founder Orlando B. Vea led its formation and serves as its President and CEO.

Maya has evolved from a digital payments app into a broader financial services platform, pairing PayMaya’s e-wallet and merchant payments network with Maya Bank, a fully licensed Philippine digital bank offering savings, deposits, and credit products.

In April 2022, Voyager raised $210 million in a round led by new investor SIG Venture Capital, with participation from EDBI, First Pacific, and existing shareholders including PLDT, KKR, Tencent, and the IFC — pushing its valuation to roughly $1.4 billion and making it the Philippines’ second unicorn.

A large share of Filipinos remain unbanked or underbanked, without easy access to formal savings, credit, or digital payment tools — a gap that traditional brick-and-mortar banking has been slow to close given the cost of physical branch coverage across the Philippines' geography.

Digital payments alone (an e-wallet) address only part of that gap; without a real digital bank behind it, users still lack access to savings interest, credit, and other core banking products.

Filipino consumers (particularly those underserved by traditional banks) and MSMEs, served through both PayMaya's payments/e-wallet network and Maya Bank's licensed digital banking products.

Voyager's key structural advantage is pairing a large, established digital payments network (PayMaya) with an actual BSP-licensed digital bank (Maya Bank) under one roof — letting it move users from "just an e-wallet" into real banking relationships (savings, credit) without needing a separate partner bank.

Its backing and lineage from PLDT/Smart also gave it early distribution advantages via one of the Philippines' largest telco customer bases, something few standalone fintech challengers can replicate.