the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  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 lend...

Q1 2026 underscored why BDO still dominates in scale, while BPI leads in efficiency and returns. In Philippine banking, size and finesse rarely travel in equal measure. BDO Unibank, the country’s largest lender, resembles a financial archipelago unto itself: vast, deposit-rich and deeply embedded in the cash flows of households, malls, merchants and corporations. Bank of the Philippine Islands, older and more patrician, looks less like a sprawl and more like a carefully tuned machine. The first quarter of 2026 offered a useful contrast. Both banks made more money than a year earlier. Both were bruised by bond-market losses. But the manner of their performance revealed two quite different banking models. BDO still won on scale; BPI won on efficiency.  BDO reported net profit of ₱20.2bn , up 2.1% year on year , while BPI earned ₱17.0bn , up about 1.8% . On the surface, the larger bank won. Yet profit is only the first sentence of the story. BDO generated pre-impairment operating...

BDO Unibank Inc., the banking arm long central to the Sy family’s financial empire, entered 2026 with a familiar distinction: it remained a powerful dividend machine for SM Investments Corp. Yet beneath the comfort of record earnings and rising payouts, the country’s largest bank is showing signs that the next leg of dividend growth may be harder won. BDO posted record net income of ₱87.2 billion in 2025 , up 6% from the prior year, as its balance sheet continued to expand across loans, deposits and investment securities. Total resources climbed 11% to ₱5.4 trillion , loans rose 13% to ₱3.7 trillion , deposits increased 10% to ₱4.2 trillion , and equity advanced 12% to ₱644.1 billion . The bank also remained the Philippines’ largest lender by assets, loans, deposits and trust assets, with 1,994 domestic branches and 7,716 ATMs, CDMs and related machines as of end-2025. For SM Investments, which holds 40.6% of BDO’s common shares , the bank remains a major source of recurring income....

  Using publicly disclosed 2025 dividend declarations and ownership stakes, Metrobank, BPI and BDO emerge as the biggest identifiable cash spigots to the parent holding companies of GT Capital, Ayala Corp. and SM Investments. When investors look at Philippine conglomerates, the eye usually goes first to malls, property launches, auto sales or telecom towers. But at the parent-company level, the more revealing question is simpler: which subsidiaries actually throw cash up to the holding company? On that test, the answer for the Ty, Zobel and Sy groups is strikingly similar. Their banks — Metrobank for GT Capital Holdings Inc., Bank of the Philippine Islands for Ayala Corp., and BDO Unibank for SM Investments Corp. — were the biggest identifiable dividend engines feeding the top of the house in 2025.  Start with GT Capital . The Ty family holding company’s ownership map ties it directly to Metrobank , and Metrobank’s own disclosures show that GT Capital owns 37.2% of the bank...