Mastercard and Boost Capital team to support SMBs in the Philippines

By Gloria Mathias

Mastercard has announced a philanthropic partnership with technology provider Boost Capital, with the aim of unlocking access to digital financial services for over 10,000 small businesses, especially women-led enterprises, in the Philippines.

This new partnership, supported by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, will use technology to enable Filipino small enterprises to access capital, knowledge, and resources.

The program follows a previous partnership between the two organizations in Cambodia that showcased how digital onboarding channels, paired with greater financial literacy, can de-risk and expand lending to small businesses.

This program in the Philippines will leverage learnings and insights from Cambodia and facilitate financial service providers’ broadening access to digital financial services by improving merchant onboarding and extending financial literacy training to their small business customers.

“The results from our partnership in Cambodia clearly demonstrated the value that pairing credit with capacity building can have on unlocking capital for underserved small businesses. By building on that work, we aim to empower more small businesses in the Philippines and facilitate their transition to the digital economy,” said Shamina Singh, Founder and President of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

With funding from Mastercard Strive, an initiative under the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, Boost Capital will collaborate with financial service providers in the Philippines to use this technology to bring more female small business owners into the formal financial ecosystem and provide them with services to support and grow their businesses.

In addition to broadening access to financial services, the program will build the capacity of small business owners to support their long-term financial health through chat-based financial education interwoven throughout their financial service lifecycle.

“We are excited to be working with Mastercard Strive to unlock and expand credit for Filipino small businesses. This new grant will extend our technology to a wider set of partners and de-risk its adoption by smaller financial service providers, who might otherwise be hesitant to go digital. Encouraging them to explore new client onboarding channels will unlock access to a wealth of digital financial services to support small business growth,” said Lucinda Revell, Co-Founder of Boost Capital.