How GCash leverages OceanBase database solution to accelerate its growth and serve over 90 million users

Greg Igaya, Technology and DevOps Head of GCash, shared his experience on how a modern database with enhanced scalability, reliability, security, and cost-efficiency can further foster trust and accelerate business growth in digital financial services.

In recent years, the Philippines has made significant strides in financial technology as part of its digital transformation. The country has embraced digital financial services, fuelled by rising smartphone usage and a young, tech-savvy population. Key fintech players are providing innovative solutions that enhance financial inclusion, streamline payments, and improve access to credit for marginalised communities.

OceanBase, a multi-cloud distributed database, is contributing to this transformation alongside major digital companies in the Philippines. OceanBase recently won the Philippines Technology Excellence Award in Data Centre - Financial Technology category at the Asian Technology Excellence Awards 2024. This accolade underscores its ongoing efforts to innovate in financial technology with modern database solutions in collaboration with GCash. 

GCash, under Mynt (Globe Fintech Innovations Inc.), is a leader in the Philippines' digital payment revolution. As the Philippines’ leading finance super app, largest cashless ecosystem and first "double unicorn," it serves over 90 million users—meaning more than eight in ten Filipinos use its services. To support its growth and ensure reliable service, GCash sought a robust and scalable database solution.

As a high-performance, scalable distributed database, OceanBase supports hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) and offers strong data consistency, high availability and compatibility with SQL. OceanBase has successfully aided over 1,000 customers worldwide in upgrading their database systems. 

In an interview with Asian Business Review, Greg Igaya, Technology and DevOps Head of GCash offers insights on how GCash works with OceanBase to upgrade and optimise its database system, to address its challenges effectively.

Can you share with us what the experience has been like collaborating with OceanBase for the project? What has been your main takeaway with regard to the success of the technical partnership? 

Our partnership with OceanBase has been a solid win for us. When we first moved to OceanBase in 2018, we were using a traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) to support our core operations. But as the pandemic hit and transaction volumes surged, we needed a solution that could handle the scale. That is where OceanBase came in. It was built for this kind of demand and fully compatible with our existing application layer, thanks to its adherence to SQL standards.

Its high throughput and data redundancy design means our financial transactions are not just scalable but secure. Plus, the system requires less day-to-day maintenance, which has been a big plus for our team. On top of that, the distributed data management model has helped us cut down on operational costs, which is critical given the massive amount of data GCash handles.

What really stands out, though, is the level of support we’ve received from the OceanBase team. They’ve been consistently responsive to our daily needs, from database tuning to incident management. Initially, OceanBase was available on Alibaba Cloud, but the team is pushing the boundaries by expanding support to other cloud providers like AWS and even offering full support for on-premise setups. That’s the kind of forward-thinking approach that keeps our partnership strong.

What makes OceanBase’s advanced database solutions stand out amongst other similar solutions in the market? Similarly, what makes them the most fit system to address GCash’s pain points?

OceanBase was built with scale and availability as top priorities, designed to handle the high concurrency rates and wide geographic distribution, which are also seen in Alipay across China. Achieving high query-per-second (QPS) throughput alongside zero recovery point objective (RPO) and low recovery time objective (RTO) is a significant challenge, especially in the financial services sector, where a “NoSQL” or “eventual consistency” approach simply won’t cut it. OceanBase addresses this with its efficient horizontal scaling and robust data consensus model.

Additionally, OceanBase's design inherently lowers operational costs by optimising data distribution and compression, effectively reducing our TCO by approx. 30-40%. This makes the goal of delivering our vision of “finance for all” not just achievable but also more cost-effective.

Amidst the success of OceanBase solutions in addressing GCash’s operational challenges, how are you going to ensure their scalability and flexibility in resolving potential issues in the future? 

The OceanBase team has been innovating steadily for years. We've been particularly focussed on developing cross-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions to minimise geographic risks in our operations. Another exciting area for us is enhancing support for document-store and key-value models in OceanBase. 

This upgrade will enable more efficient query optimisation and allow us to shift some of our data workloads from a separate data warehouse and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) layer into a hybrid Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)-OLAP environment. This shift brings us closer to real-time data analysis and sets the stage for streamlining our technology footprint in the future.

How has the success of the technical partnership translated into GCash’s strong relationship with users? How did the latter’s stakeholders receive the solutions provided by OceanBase?

At GCash, we prioritise trust and security, ensuring that our users' funds are protected at all times. This commitment is key to the ongoing growth of digital financial services in the Philippines. With OceanBase's cutting-edge technology, we can ensure that customer data and transactions are secure and consistent, providing a solid foundation to support the future expansion of our local financial services industry.

The Asian Technology Excellence Awards is presented by Asian Business Review. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2025 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding retail initiatives, please contact Jane Patiag at [email protected].