Ask a Filipino shop owner what it took to open a business bank account and you will hear a small odyssey: a maintaining balance the shop can't spare, a stack of documents, a branch visit during working hours, and a wait. For a country where the overwhelming majority of enterprises are micro, small or medium sized, the front door to formal banking has a step that a lot of people simply can't clear. NextPay's founders looked at that step and decided the answer was not a better bank. It was to move the money without one.
NextPay is a Pasig-based fintech that lets small and medium businesses do the unglamorous, load-bearing parts of running money - paying staff and suppliers, collecting from customers, sending invoices, reconciling what came in against what was owed - all from a dashboard, and all without a corporate bank account, a setup fee, or a minimum balance sitting idle. It calls itself the digital bank for small businesses, while being careful to note it is not, in the regulatory sense, a bank.
01 - THE PROBLEMA country of small businesses, locked out
The gap NextPay serves is not exotic. It is arithmetic. The Philippine economy runs on MSMEs, and the financial products aimed at them were designed for someone else - larger, more developed companies that can absorb steep requirements and high fees. A small business that just wants to pay thirty employees spread across a dozen different banks and e-wallets ends up doing it by hand, one transfer at a time, or paying a premium for the privilege.
The founders, Don Pansacola and Aldrich Tan, are Canadian-Filipino. They trace the idea to 2016, on a business trip back to the Philippines, when they noticed how thin the financial rails were for the entrepreneurs around them. Pansacola had been on the core product team at OpenDNS before Cisco acquired it. Tan came from design roles at BlackBerry, Getty Images and Remitly, and runs UXPH, a Philippine design community. The pairing shows up in the product: infrastructure that a non-technical shopkeeper can actually use.
It is worth sitting with the shape of the problem, because it explains the shape of the company. In the Philippines, banking has historically been organized around branches, physical documents and balances that prove a business is "serious." That framework works for a manufacturer with a finance department. It works badly for a two-person online store, a neighborhood distributor, or a services firm that pays freelancers scattered across half a dozen banks. For those businesses the cost is not just fees. It is the hours lost, the errors introduced by typing account numbers by hand, and the customers who pay late because there was no simple way to invoice them. NextPay treats all of that as one connected problem rather than a series of separate ones.
02 - THE PRODUCTWhat you can actually do with it
The clearest way to understand NextPay is to watch a small business's Friday afternoon. Payroll is a batch upload instead of a queue of manual transfers. Suppliers get paid to whichever bank or e-wallet they use, from a single balance. Customers receive a digital invoice with a QR Ph code and automatic reminders, and when they pay, the platform reconciles the transaction on its own. For companies that want the plumbing rather than the dashboard, there is an API.
Each of those pieces removes a specific chore. Reconciliation is the least visible and often the most valuable: matching a wall of incoming transfers against a list of who owed what is the kind of task that eats an afternoon and hides mistakes. Automating it across QR Ph and dozens of bank transfer formats is unglamorous work, and it is exactly the sort of thing a small team will happily pay to never think about again. The invoicing reminders do something similar on the collections side, nudging late payers so the owner does not have to send the awkward follow-up message themselves.
Batch disbursements and payroll to any of 90+ Philippine banks and e-wallets, with real-time status tracking and no corporate bank account required.
Digital invoices with smart reminders, payment tracking, and automatic reconciliation across QR Ph and Philippine bank transfers.
A developer API for embedding collections, payouts and multi-merchant accounts inside another company's product.
Send and request money by email, lowering the barrier to digital transactions for smaller merchants.
03 - TRACTIONThe quiet pipe
NextPay's growth story is less about a splashy consumer app and more about a pipe that quietly moves a lot of money. The company reports thousands of growing businesses on the platform and billions of pesos in processed volume - the kind of number that only accumulates when the boring parts work every single time.
Backing came fast. NextPay joined Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch with a $125,000 pre-seed check, one of only a handful of Philippine companies YC has funded, alongside names like PayMongo and Kalibrr. Months later it closed a $1.6 million seed round led by Golden Gate Ventures, with Foxmont Capital and SM Group. It operates as a registered Operator of Payment System under the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, which is the regulatory ground a payments company has to stand on to be taken seriously.
Regulation is not a footnote in this business - it is part of the moat. Any company that touches other people's money at scale has to satisfy a central bank, and the requirements are the same tall step that keeps casual competitors out. NextPay's willingness to operate inside that framework is part of why thousands of businesses have been comfortable routing real payroll and supplier payments through it rather than a stopgap.
04 - FOCUSThe subtraction that mattered
The most instructive thing NextPay did was give something up. It had run payment acceptance - the card-and-QR collection side - alongside disbursements. It then wound the acceptance business down to concentrate on payouts, the part of the workflow where MSMEs felt the most pain and where fewer competitors were fighting. Focus is usually described as a decision to add. Here it was a decision to remove.
05 - THE MARKETWhere it sits
In the Philippine fintech map, the loud names sit on the consumer and merchant-acceptance side - PayMongo, Maya Business, Xendit. NextPay chose the back office. The comparison it likes to draw is not against another app but against the traditional corporate bank account, and the contrast is the whole pitch.
| Setting up to pay your team | Traditional corporate account | NextPay |
|---|---|---|
| Maintaining balance | Required | None |
| Setup fee | Often | None |
| Branch visit | Usually | No |
| Batch payout to many banks | Painful | One upload |
| Auto-reconciliation | Manual | Built in |
That positioning has a wider edge worth naming for anyone building in emerging markets: the value is not in copying a US template but in fitting one country's specific texture - QR Ph, dozens of local banks and wallets, and BSP rules. A product built for exactly one market is harder to build and harder to copy, which is the point. A generic global payments tool can be spun up anywhere; a system that knows how each Philippine bank formats a transfer and how to reconcile a QR Ph payment has to be earned, one integration at a time.
It also means the competitive question is not simply "who has the slickest app." It is "who has done the tedious integration work and cleared the regulatory bar for the businesses everyone else considers too small to bother with." That is a market defined less by glamour than by patience, and NextPay has aimed itself squarely at it. The businesses it serves are the ones a larger institution would decline to onboard, which is precisely why the relationship tends to stick once it starts.
06 - WHAT'S NEXTBeyond payouts
The roadmap the company has talked about publicly stretches past moving money: bills payment, lending, corporate cards and additional MSME tools, plus an Email Money feature already introduced and financial tooling extended to non-profits for fundraising and fee collection. The through-line is consistent. Take a service that formal banking reserves for the large, and hand it to the small.
For a small business owner, the plainest version of NextPay's value is time. The Friday afternoon that used to disappear into manual transfers becomes an upload. That is a modest promise, and modest promises kept at scale are how infrastructure companies grow.