Netbank co-founder Gus Poston
Netbank has concluded a Series B round led by Singapore-based Altara Ventures, betting that the next phase of Philippine fintech growth will be won not by the flashiest consumer app, but by the regulated banking plumbing underneath it.
The company did not disclose the size of the round. Existing backers BeeNext, Kaya Founders, January Capital, Oak Drive Ventures, and Boleh Ventures all participated again, a sign that investors are still willing to fund infrastructure plays in a market where compliance, bank integrations, and product rollouts remain painfully slow.
Netbank plans to use the new capital to deepen payments, lending, account, and card capabilities, while investing in automation, risk systems, and engineering.
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The Philippines is becoming one of Southeast Asia’s more compelling proving grounds for embedded finance. Digital payments are rising fast, more services are moving into apps, and platforms from lenders to marketplaces increasingly want to offer financial products without becoming banks themselves. Netbank’s pitch is straightforward: let those businesses plug into regulated accounts, payments, cards, and lending through APIs, while Netbank handles the banking layer.
In plain English, it wants to be the bank in the background.
Why this round matters
The timing of the fundraise is notable. Across the region, fintech funding has become harder to secure, and investors have grown less patient with glossy growth stories unsupported by revenue. Netbank is leaning into the opposite message. It said revenue grew 88 per cent year on year in FY2025 and that it was profitable while expanding its accounts, payments and card-issuing products. That is a more credible story than the usual “land grab now, economics later” script.
Founder Gus Poston put it bluntly in the announcement, saying fintechs in the Philippines eventually “hit the same wall” when they need a bank that can move at startup speed. That line gets to the core of the opportunity. Building financial products in the country is not simply a design or distribution challenge; it is an infrastructure problem. Licensing, settlement, compliance and integrations still create friction that younger companies struggle to absorb.
Netbank is trying to monetise that bottleneck.
The Philippines is fertile ground for embedded banking
Embedded banking in the Philippines is growing as several forces converge.
First, digital payments are now mainstream rather than experimental. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (central bank) data shows digital payments accounted for 52.8 per cent of retail payment transactions by volume in 2023, up sharply from 42.1 per cent in 2022 and just 20.1 per cent in 2018. Once consumers and businesses are already paying digitally, it becomes much easier to layer on accounts, credit, cards, payroll tools, and disbursements inside the same platforms.
Second, the country still has a deep access gap. Formal account ownership has improved, but millions of Filipinos and small businesses remain underserved by traditional banks, especially outside major urban centres. Embedded finance works well in markets like this because it delivers financial services through apps people already use, rather than forcing them to start at a bank branch.
Third, small businesses need capital and better collection tools. The Philippines has a large MSME base, yet access to working capital remains uneven. That creates room for platforms to embed lending, merchant settlement, and cash management services directly into the software used by sellers, gig workers, and service providers.
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Fourth, regulation has become more enabling. The central bank has aggressively pushed digitisation, while open finance and instant payment rails are making it easier for licensed players to build new products without recreating the stack each time.
Who Netbank is targeting
Netbank sells to businesses that want to embed financial services into their own products. That includes fintech startups, lending platforms, remittance operators, payroll and HR software providers, marketplaces, vertical SaaS companies, and other digital platforms that need regulated accounts, real-time disbursements, collections, cards or credit rails without building bank partnerships from scratch.
Its value proposition is strongest for companies that are growing quickly but do not want the pain of stitching together one provider for payments, another for KYC, another for cards and still another for lending infrastructure. A licensed bank with modular APIs can reduce that complexity.
Netbank said its active partner base expanded substantially in FY2025, but did not disclose the exact number of companies it has partnered with to date. That omission is frustrating, though not unusual for infrastructure startups that prefer to talk in terms of volume and revenue rather than customer counts.
How Netbank makes money
Like other banking-as-a-service and embedded finance providers, Netbank’s revenue model is likely a mix of recurring platform income and transaction-based fees.
That typically includes:
- fees on payment processing, disbursements and collections;
- account-related charges for white-labelled banking products;
- card economics such as interchange and programme fees;
- lending income through origination, servicing or balance-sheet participation; and
- custom integration or enterprise service fees for larger partners.
Because Netbank operates on a banking licence, it can do more than a pure software middleware player. That should give it more ways to monetise each partner relationship, especially as partners expand from payments into cards and credit.
The competitive field is getting busier
Netbank may be unusual in positioning itself as an embedded finance platform running on a banking licence, but it is not building in an empty lane.
In the Philippines, Brankas is one of the best-known names in open finance and API-led banking infrastructure. UBX, the fintech arm of UnionBank, has also built rails for digital financial services and ecosystem partnerships. Large digital banks and financial super-apps, such as Maya, are increasingly building more extensible infrastructure, even if their models differ from Netbank’s.
On the financing side, players including BillEase, UnaCash, Cashalo, and Atome have helped normalise embedded credit inside merchant and checkout flows. They are not direct like-for-like competitors to Netbank’s full-stack banking infrastructure model, but they do shape customer expectations around instant, in-app finance.
That is the broader point: embedded finance in the Philippines is no longer a niche concept. Consumers already encounter it at checkout, in wallets, in salary-linked products and in merchant apps. The next battle is over who supplies the rails.
Where the sector is headed
The space is moving away from simple payment integrations and towards full-stack embedded banking. That means more demand for real-time collections and disbursements, embedded cards, sector-specific credit, cross-border payment rails, and compliance automation that can survive closer regulatory scrutiny.
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It also means the winners may look less like pure software startups and more like regulated infrastructure businesses with defensible economics.
Altara’s Dave Ng said a regional gap remains in “dependable financial infrastructure”. That is the investment thesis in one sentence. Southeast Asia does not lack fintech ideas; it lacks enough reliable back-end systems to support them at scale.
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