Ayala-backed Mynt and SM-controlled BDO Unibank, Inc. are two very different machines for turning Filipino credit demand into profit. One earns fat fintech spreads. The other survives on scale, funding discipline and clean loans.
Call it the new arithmetic of Philippine finance. On one side is Mynt, the GCash parent in which Ayala Corporation increased exposure through AC Ventures Holding Corp., helping push Mynt’s valuation to about US$5 billion before the planned IPO. On the other hand is BDO Unibank, Inc., the country’s largest bank and the crown jewel of the SM financial ecosystem, with SM Investments Corporation disclosed as BDO’s largest common shareholder at 40.60% as of end-2025.
At first glance, the comparison looks unfair. BDO Unibank, Inc. is a universal bank with about ₱3.8 trillion in gross customer loans in the first quarter of 2026. Mynt’s CreditTech loan portfolio was only about ₱64.1 billion as of March 31, 2026. BDO is the aircraft carrier; Mynt’s lending business is the speedboat. But speedboats move faster, charge more, and hit rough water harder.
The margin story
The most revealing metric is not plain net income. It is what remains after the cost of money and the cost of bad loans. For BDO Unibank, Inc., the closest like-for-like proxy is:
NIMAL proxy = Net interest income after impairment losses / Gross interest income
For Q1 2026, BDO reported ₱77.455 billion in gross interest income, ₱24.426 billion in interest expense, ₱53.029 billion in net interest income, and ₱6.148 billion in impairment losses. That left ₱46.881 billion of net interest income after impairment losses. The corrected BDO NIMAL proxy is therefore 60.5%.
For Mynt, the prospectus metric is presented differently. CreditTech reported a NIMAL of 23.4% in Q1 2026 and 23.7% for 2025. This is a high post-loss lending margin for a mass-market digital credit business. But if the comparison is framed as revenue retention after funding costs and provisions, Mynt looks less spectacular: funding costs were about 5% of CreditTech revenues, while provisions were about 45.9% of CreditTech revenues in Q1 2026, meaning roughly 49% of CreditTech revenue remained after those two major costs.
That is the first lesson. Mynt’s CreditTech produces richer loan economics than a bank in yield terms, but BDO retains a larger share of gross interest income after funding and impairment. In plain English: Mynt charges more because it must lose more. BDO charges less because it can afford to.
The NPL gap
The second difference is asset quality. Mynt’s CreditTech NPL ratio was 5.1% as of March 31, 2026, improving from 7.5% at end-2025. That is not alarming for unsecured, short-tenor, mass-market fintech lending, but it is high by universal-bank standards.
BDO Unibank, Inc., by contrast, disclosed a Q1 2026 NPL ratio of 1.68%, down from 1.77% a year earlier. BDO’s loan book is larger, broader and more diversified, with corporate, middle-market and consumer exposures. More than half of the consumer portfolio is secured, according to management commentary reported around its Q1 results.
So the NPL comparison is stark:
Metric | Mynt CreditTech | BDO |
|---|---|---|
Q1 2026 NPL ratio | 5.1% | 1.68% |
Mynt’s NPL ratio is roughly three times BDO’s. That is the price of lending to borrowers whom conventional banks may not reach, underwrite, or serve profitably.
The reserve cushion
Oddly enough, the riskier book has the thicker reserve cushion. Mynt reported 255.8% loan loss coverage in Q1 2026. BDO Unibank, Inc. reported 132% NPL coverage for the same period.
The superficial read is that Mynt is more conservative. The better read is that Mynt has to be. A digital lender serving thin-file, underbanked, and unsecured borrowers needs a much larger buffer because delinquency can move quickly. BDO’s 132% coverage sits atop a much cleaner, broader, and more collateralized credit base. Mynt’s 255.8% coverage sits atop a smaller but more volatile book.
The provision burden
Provisioning shows the real contrast. In pesos, BDO’s impairment losses were larger: ₱6.148 billion in Q1 2026 versus Mynt CreditTech’s provision for credit losses of about ₱4.0 billion. But BDO’s loan book was vastly larger.
As a burden on revenue, Mynt is heavier. Mynt’s Q1 2026 provisions consumed about 45.9% of CreditTech revenue. BDO’s Q1 2026 impairment losses were only about 7.9% of gross interest income, calculated as ₱6.148 billion / ₱77.455 billion.
That number is the heart of the story. BDO’s credit cost is a manageable drag on a giant interest-income engine. Mynt’s credit cost is built into the business model. The fintech earns exceptional yields, but nearly half of CreditTech revenue went to provisioning in Q1 2026.
Scale versus intensity
BDO’s advantage is scale. In 2025, BDO generated ₱87.2 billion in net income attributable to equity holders, with ₱203.1 billion in net interest income and ₱15.0 billion in provision for impairment losses. In Q1 2026, it earned about ₱20.1 billion to ₱20.2 billion, even while raising provisions as a pre-emptive response to geopolitical risk.
Mynt’s advantage is intensity. CreditTech revenue rose from ₱10.2 billion in 2023 to ₱16.7 billion in 2024 and ₱28.5 billion in 2025, then reached ₱8.73 billion in Q1 2026, up 47.8% year on year. CreditTech contributed about 42.1% of Mynt's adjusted revenues in Q1 2026.
So BDO is much bigger. But Mynt’s lending unit is growing faster and taking a larger share of the group's economics. Payments built the GCash habit; CreditTech is monetizing the habit.
A cleaner comparison
Here is the cleanest side-by-side view for Q1 2026:
| Metric | Ayala-backed Mynt CreditTech | SM-controlled BDO |
|---|---|---|
| Loan book / gross loans | ₱64.1B | ~₱3.8T |
| Reported / proxy NIMAL | 23.4% reported CreditTech NIMAL | 60.5% gross-interest retention proxy |
| NPL ratio | 5.1% | 1.68% |
| Loan loss coverage | 255.8% | 132% |
| Provision/impairment losses | ₱4.0B | ₱6.148B |
| Provision burden | ~45.9% of CreditTech revenue | ~7.9% of gross interest income |
The labels matter. Mynt’s 23.4% NIMAL is not identical to BDO’s 60.5% proxy because the companies disclose and structure credit income differently. But the comparison still reveals the same economic truth: Mynt is a high-yield, high-loss lender; BDO is a lower-yield, lower-loss banking machine.
The verdict
If profitability means absolute earnings, BDO wins easily. The bank earned more in one quarter than Mynt’s entire group did in much of its earlier expansion phase. Its loan book is enormous, its NPL ratio is low, and its provisioning burden is modest relative to interest income.
If profitability means growth and yield per peso of lending exposure, Mynt is the more exciting story. CreditTech is scaling rapidly, its NIMAL remains high, and its proprietary underwriting through the GCash ecosystem gives it access to borrowers and data that banks struggle to capture cheaply.
The danger is that investors confuse excitement with safety. Mynt’s lending economics look powerful precisely because they price for risk. The NPL ratio is higher, the provision burden is much heavier, and the business must keep proving that data-driven underwriting can outrun credit deterioration. BDO, duller and slower, has already proved that a large Philippine bank can compound profits through cycles.
The punchline is therefore not that Mynt is better than BDO, or BDO better than Mynt. It is that they are selling two different versions of Philippine finance. BDO sells safety at scale. Mynt sells risk at speed. The market will decide which deserves the richer multiple.
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Disclaimer: This is for informational purposes and is not investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs.
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