Martha Sazon stood on the trading floor of the Philippine Stock Exchange, huddled with her core leadership team, and took a selfie with no less than President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. It was a busy morning for Mynt’s top boss, who had overseen GCash’s spectacular rise into a fintech unicorn and was now ringing the bell on the biggest IPO in Philippine history.

Now, her moment of reckoning.

With the toll of that bell, her considerable fortune has a public price tag. At Mynt’s P6.60 IPO price, her 220.1 million shares were worth a cool P1.45 billion. Sazon was also offering about 44 million of her shares for sale, potentially pocketing P290.55 million before taxes and fees, while keeping another 176.1 million shares worth P1.16 billion.

Cheers to the newly Mynted billionaire.

Of course, this moment didn’t magically make Mynt’s president and CEO rich. Those shares were valuable even before the initial public offering (IPO), when Mynt was still privately held. But an IPO is everybody’s favorite liquidity event, and Sazon — like GCash’s early private equity backers — turned some of that paper wealth into actual cash.

Quite the reward for someone who wasn’t around when GCash started in 2004, back when it felt more like a fun party trick for Globe users to send money via SMS.

Sazon’s journey to the top of fintech took more than a few turns. A University of the Philippines (UP) accountancy graduate, she started her career in banking, where the pay was good, but she had her eye on marketing. So much so that she willingly took a pay cut to move into sales, waking up early to learn the ropes from merchandisers and store personnel. 

“There is no shame in starting at the bottom,” she recalled in a 2023 graduation speech she delivered at the UP Virata School of Business.

From there came stints at Del Monte and GlaxoSmithKline, working across food, pharmaceuticals, and personal care, before she spent 12 years at Globe. She rose through the ranks managing its postpaid, small-business, and broadband operations. By the time then-Globe chief Ernest Cu tapped her to lead Mynt in 2020, she had a marketer’s understanding of Filipino consumers and a telco veteran’s discipline in delivering products to them fast. 

Fintech, however, is a different beast.

Finance and technology weren’t exactly her specialties, and taking over a company in the middle of lockdowns — without even meeting much of the team in person — was hardly an inviting prospect. But the timing couldn’t have been better for GCash. With the pandemic raging, Filipinos suddenly needed ways to pay bills, move money, and shop without handling cash. 

Those who’ve complained about GCash’s demanding work culture might find Sazon’s talk of an “obsession” with solving customer problems and setting ever-higher targets painfully familiar. But the growth is hard to dispute. By June 2026, GCash had 41.5 million monthly active users.

And the personal accolades have followed. Sazon made it into Forbes’ 2026 50 Over 50 Global list and Fortune’s Asia’s 100 Most Powerful Women, ranking 35th, up two spots from 2025 and the highest among Filipinas.

Road ahead

Now that Mynt has reached this milestone, where does Sazon take it next?

“Becoming a public company is not the finish line,” she told the crowd at the PSE. (READ: On day one, rush for GCash IPO shares briefly trips up trading systems)

The ambition is to make the fintech superapp’s lending services as big a revenue contributor as payments. In the first half of 2026, the split was 43% to 57%, respectively. Mynt is now allocating 60% of its nearly P10 billion in net fresh IPO proceeds to expand its loan portfolio over the next few years.

Executives explained much of this to reporters at the post-listing media briefing — that is, executives with the conspicuous exception of Sazon herself. Word has it Bloomberg got first dibs on the CEO, who was whisked away for the interview right after the listing ceremony.

“With regards to the stock performance, it’s encouraging to see early gains, and hopefully, we are able to sustain it and even see an increase later in the day,” she told Bloomberg TV, all smiles as GCash shares traded about 1.5% above their offer price at the time.

The market, as always, is unknowable.

After briefly reaching P6.76, GCash finished its debut at P6.60, precisely where it started, before sliding down to P6.27 to close its first week of trading. Investment bank UBS, the IPO’s stabilizing agent, has a P7.95-billion stabilization fund to snap up shares and cushion declines below P6.60 until mid-November. But even with that much firepower, there’s only so much it can do to keep the stock from falling.

For now, the fintech queen’s newly public fortune is at the mercy of the market. – Rappler.com