GCash, Nice to have known you

Ingo Noka
Opinion

For a while I have observed a strange fraying of the edges of the GCASH business which still commands a large market share in e-wallet accounts.

For a long time there was no stoping the success of GCash. The name became synonymous with QR Payments, and even today most people will ask for Gcash payment even so they are using QRPh.

However, Gcash seems to be losing ground. I outlined the reasons for this decline more generally in another post.

But there is also the lack of focus on the strength of QR payments in the GCash user experience, which is the topic of this post.

Admittedly, I base my argument only on my own experience, but I believe that I have not been the only one who finds themselves lately reaching for the good old payment card more often.

And so, this is my list of annoying features of the GCash payment experience.

  • It takes the GCash application forever to start. You might say it takes only 10 seconds or so, but I can assure you that 10 seconds feels like an eternity when you are in front of the cashier and ten people waiting in line behind you.

  • The super annoying marketing message I have to go through before I get to the user interface of the application. To add injury to insult, instead of simply offering an option to ignore the message, I am only given the option for the app “to remind me later”. This is as close as a consumer facing company could come to openly mocking their customers. I am sure somebody at GCash got a bonus or became employee of the north for coming up with this abomination, but I actively hate it!

  • In some indeterminate intervals, the app discovers the need to go through some security procedures with me again. This usually happens when I just want to quickly pay for my coffee. Why did I not get a notification earlier to reactivate my biometric authentication or to reconnect my bank account, and why am I not given the option to pay first, maybe with a lower transaction limit, and then attend to everything else when I sit down sipping my coffee?

  • I do not think I have been able to finish any of the “procedures” for refreshing my authentication, bank account link and whatever else, without being greeted with some unhelpful error screen.

    Usually, repeating the same thing will fix the issue, which is telling me that the messaging and transaction synchronization in the backend is not well-designed or underpowered.

  • For online transactions, GCash is now making the same mistakes as the traditional payment monopolies. They do not know who they are doing business with. The only recourse for an unknown recurring charge seems to be a repeated decline until some merchant comes out of the woodwork or the merchant (maybe a fraudster) gives up and stops charging the GCash account.

    The way to combat fraud and defeat scammers is transparency and empowerment of the customer. It should be exceedingly simple to stop a recurring charge and even simpler to figure out where the charge is coming from and to contact or report the merchant. I am talking one-click operations here! (see this post for some ideas: (1))

  • It is almost comical how many times I have to input usernames, passwords and one time passcodes when loading money from a bank account. The worst thing is that filling in the one-time passcode does not work consistently. Sometimes I have to enter every digit individually, sometimes I can just autofill the code, and sometimes I have to switch to the messaging application to get the code. And why do I have to click through multiple screens to get back to the Home Screen to finally start my payment transaction?

  • The little pop-up screen with a thank-you message is infuriating, especially when I am not yet finished with what I came to do. I am already using your app, I like it and I do not need your fake “customer care”. Make the whole experience fast, convenient and customer-centered and I will thank you by continuing my patronage.

  • There does not seem to be any risk management involved in the transaction processing. A ten thousand Peso transaction works exactly like the 150 Peso coffee payment. You have my transaction history, you know a lot about my purchasing habits, I am positively authenticated through your application, and still you treat me like you know nothing about me. Is it really so difficult to make a small QR payment as fast and painless as a contactless credit card payment?

(1) I. Noka, “QR Payments - Innovate, don’t imitate!” AFCS Blog, Oct. 2025, [Online]. Available: https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/post/a2a_wo_account_data/a2a_wo_account_data/.