THE Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) has tied up with GCash to allow subscribers of the mobile payment platform to directly invest in the stock market, the local bourse’s top official said on Tuesday.

“GCash and PSE have agreed to tie up. And we will be offering stock trading to the 67 million subscribers of GCash,” PSE President and Chief Executive Officer Ramon S. Monzon said in an interview on BusinessWorld Live.

“We agreed on the commercial terms and we are now doing the technical issues,” Mr. Monzon added.

Through the partnership, the PSE will design a platform that will allow GCash users to be able to invest directly in the stock market.

“Because of the profile of GCash subscribers, we are also in the process of studying how we can offer or make possible fractional trading in shares so that more GCash subscribers are able to invest in stocks,” Mr. Monzon said.

He said that the PSE already reached an agreement with GCash that the broker that will handle the said transaction will be AB Capital Securities, Inc.

“It’s a tripartite agreement between PSE, GCash and AB Capital,” he added.

Mr. Monzon said: “By November, GCash subscribers should be able to invest already in the stock market.”

The PSE chief said that the tie-up with GCash will be a game-changer for the stock exchange in terms of the number of retail investors participating in the market.

“The PSE was organized in 1927. We’re talking about 94 years and we only have 1.7 million stock market investors,” Mr. Monzon said.

“When we were going over the projections of GCash, they project[ed] about more than nine million new investors in five years’ time,” he added.