JAZA’s GCash Legacy: 16 Years of Nobody Using It, Then One Pandemic, Now Essential National Infrastructure
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Globe Telecom Legend Steps Down After 28 Years, Leaves Behind App That Sometimes Works
BONIFACIO GLOBAL CITY — Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, known to the Philippine business community as JAZA and to GCash error messages as “the reason this exists,” has stepped down as chairman of Globe Telecom after 28 years, leaving behind a company that began as a telegraph service and ended as the invisible digital infrastructure of 90 million Filipinos who use it primarily to send money to relatives and buy game credits.
JAZA’s departure marks the end of an era that began when Globe was a scrappy challenger to PLDT’s monopoly and ended when Globe became the reason your GCash transaction failed at 7pm on a Friday, which is an even more dominant market position than simply having customers.
The GCash Origin Story
The most remarkable element of JAZA’s legacy is GCash, which was launched in 2004 and spent approximately fifteen years being ignored. According to Manila Bulletin’s detailed profile, JAZA refused to shut it down despite a decade and a half of indifference, operating on the theory that Filipinos would eventually want to send money digitally. He was correct. It took a global pandemic, the closure of all physical banks, and the cessation of normal economic life, but he was correct.
GCash is now the country’s only “double unicorn.” The sixteen-year gap between “we built this” and “everyone needs this” is either a remarkable example of visionary patience or a cautionary tale about not shutting down products that do not work for very long periods, depending on whether you are writing a Harvard Business School case study or a startup postmortem.
The Succession
The baton passes to Cezar Consing, a veteran banker, signaling that Globe’s future lies in digital finance rather than telecommunications. This makes sense given that Globe’s telecommunications function is largely experienced by Filipinos as “the thing that slows down” while GCash is experienced as “the thing that also sometimes slows down but is more important.”
Britain is currently debating whether AI is marvellous or terrifying; the Philippines resolved this question in 2020 when the option was AI-enabled digital payments or no payments at all. The answer was GCash. The downtime is a known issue. JAZA has retired. The app sends him notifications anyway.