COL’s Bigger Franchise, Thinner Yield: Why Eduard Lee May Not Be More Generous This Year on Dividend
COL Financial is adding customers, assets, and inflows even in a difficult market. But the broker’s 2025 results suggest that scale is rising faster than monetization—and that shareholders should not count on a richer payout just yet. In the brokerage business, there are years when the numbers sing and years when they merely hum. COL Financial’s 2025 results belong to the latter category: respectable, quietly impressive in parts, but not quite buoyant enough to justify exuberance. The firm ended the year with 569,365 customer accounts , up 2.94% from 2024, while customers’ net equity climbed 5.23% to ₱123.18bn despite a lackluster local stock market. Net inflows of ₱3.40bn from new and existing investors suggest that clients continued to entrust more money to the platform, and management pointed to strong retention and deeper wallet share among existing accounts. That is the sort of operating data a platform business would ordinarily celebrate. Customer growth ma...