GoTyme: kiosk-first digital bank becomes PH's most-used Visa debit card

GoTyme Bank is a Philippine digital bank jointly owned by the Gokongwei Group and Singapore-based Tyme, a digital-banking group operating in Asia and Africa. Its bet is that Filipinos will bank where they already shop: instead of branches, it offers a mobile app plus staffed digital kiosks inside Gokongwei malls, supermarkets and retail stores, where customers open accounts and receive a debit card in about five minutes.

The model was not invented in the Philippines. TymeBank in South Africa had already signed up roughly 3 million of its 3.5 million customers through kiosks in retail environments, so GoTyme's leadership — President and CEO Nate Clarke, who built TymeBank, and co-CEO Albert Tinio — brought a proven distribution playbook into the Gokongwei Group's nationwide retail footprint when the bank launched in October 2022.

The results show up in usage, not just sign-ups. By end-2025 GoTyme had 8.3M customers (1.5x the prior year), more than 500 kiosks, ₱43B in deposits (up over 70% year on year) and a loan book up 43%, with 1.3M new customers in 2025 coming from previously unbanked or underbanked segments. In February 2026 Visa named it the most-used Visa debit card in the Philippines, with more than 8M card users and payment volume up over 150% year on year.

The unresolved question is profitability: GoTyme has not disclosed earnings, and it competes with GCash and Maya on wallets and with incumbent banks digitizing their own channels. What the growth shows is that physical trust points inside an existing retail ecosystem can acquire banking customers at a scale pure-play digital apps struggle to match.