SM, PLDT team up

The country’s largest shopping mall franchise yesterday introduced a new cashless option for one of its retail formats.

SM Group’s The SM Store and PLDT Inc.’s PayMaya Philippines announced a partnership that would allow customers to purchase goods using the PayMaya app’s QR code scanning platform.

PayMaya said the system was made available to all SM Store branches nationwide last December. Rival Globe Telecom, via its GCash app, also enabled QR code payments in all SM Store outlets last month.

The SM Store had 59 branches as of the first nine months of 2017. They had a combined gross selling area of 750,000 square meters, data from SM Investments Corp. showed.

“More and more Filipinos are using cashless payments with PayMaya, and we’re excited to work with like-minded companies such as SM in innovating on the retail shopping experience with the help of our payment technologies,” PLDT chair and CEO Manuel V. Pangilinan said.

“With companies like SM taking the lead, we’ll see PayMaya QR in a lot more stores and establishments all around the country,” he added.

PayMaya’s partnership with The SM Store for QR-based payments is in line with the national retail payment system initiative led by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to increase the share of electronic transactions in the country by 20 percent by 2020.

“The retail landscape is changing, and The SM Store is proud to lead the way with partners like PayMaya,” The SM Store president Chelo C. Monasterio said in a statement.

PayMaya is one of the country’s largest online and mobile acquirers in the Philippines, powering card payment acceptance of some of the biggest e-commerce retailers in the country, including Lazada, Zalora, Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific.