Fuse Financing, Inc., the lending arm of the Philippines’ leading finance super app and largest cashless ecosystem GCash, underscored the importance of innovative financing structures at the 5th Asia Finance Forum, hosted by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at its headquarters in Manila.
The forum highlighted a critical industry pain point: fintech companies face capital constraints that limit their ability to scale, as traditional debt markets remain restrictive. This bottleneck slows progress in extending credit to the underbanked and unbanked, ultimately curbing economic inclusion.
Addressing this challenge, Gabby Lacuesta, chief financial officer of Fuse, joined the panel discussion “Financing Growth: Unlocking Co-Lending, Capital Markets & Risk-Sharing for Fintechs.” Moderated by Apurva Kumar, senior investment specialist at ADB, the session also featured Irem Sayeed, chief risk officer at UGRO Capital; Fernanda Lima, partner at LeapFrog; and Luke Boland, head of Fintech Asia at Standard Chartered Bank.
The panel discussion underscored how co-lending and off-book funding partnerships create a synergistic relationship between fintechs and banks. Through the model, banks gain a vital deployment channel that reaches underserved customers, while fintechs like Fuse are able to cycle capital more quickly and extend their market reach. Fuse leverages the GCash ecosystem, which serves eight out of ten Filipinos, as a foundation to connect partner institutions with communities often excluded from traditional lending systems.
Lacuesta highlighted that building confidence across the entire lending process is the key to unlocking funding partnerships. “For GCash, the essential unlock was demonstrating to our partners that the end-to-end system—from acquisition and underwriting to collections and recoveries—is consistently effective, reliable, and working really well,” he said.
The panelists also discussed the dynamic balance between on- and off-balance sheet lending, which shifts with market conditions and investor appetite. In practice, this balance ensures lending remains both sustainable and responsive to economic realities.
Beyond credit risk, the conversation emphasized operational and strategic risks, particularly in an environment where fintech platforms manage sensitive data at massive scale. With the reach of GCash extending to most of the country’s population, protecting customer information is a central priority and one of the most salient operational risks in digital lending. Managing these risks effectively ensures that co-lending models remain viable, efficient, and trusted.
Reflecting on Fuse’s trajectory, Lacuesta highlighted the importance of financial discipline in pursuing growth. “Where we are now would not have been possible without the different avenues for funding that we raised and developed along the way, including off-book lending,” he said. “For GCash, the experience has been really about balance.”
The Asia Finance Forum’s theme, “Bridging Financial Technology, Trust, and Regulation,” provided an essential venue to discuss regulatory frameworks that enable sustainable co-lending and other innovative financing structures. Regulators broadly support these models because of their potential to efficiently channel capital to the real economy, particularly underserved markets such as small businesses and low-income households.
By advancing co-lending and other innovative models, Fuse is committed to expanding opportunities for Filipinos and strengthening financial inclusion in Asia’s fast-growing economies.
For more information, please visit www.gcash.com.
