DragonFi debuts on Maya stock trading platform

The stock brokerage venture of DoubleDragon Corp. can now be accessed via the Manual Pangilinan-backed Maya Bank, through a partnership that seeks to bring the capital market closer to other potential traders and enable retail stock trading among existing users.

DragonFi Securities Inc. on Tuesday announced that DragonFi Lite, a streamlined version of the DragonFi mobile app, was now available via the Maya app stock trading platform.

Users of the mobile banking app were informed of the partnership as early as Aug. 22, but DragonFi Lite was only fully integrated on Tuesday, Sept. 3.

Launched last year as a response to heightened interest in retail stock trading, DragonFi now joins Maya’s other partners, Philstocks Financial Inc. and 2TradeAsia.

Compared with institutional investors that represent large organizations and have bigger capital, retail stock traders are the individual investors who buy and sell stocks for their personal accounts. Thus, they typically trade in smaller quantities.

According to DragonFi, its Lite version does not require a minimum deposit — users can start trading with any amount they can invest. Likewise, no additional fees will be charged for depositing and withdrawing money, it said.

“By offering no minimum deposits and no fees for cash-ins, we’re opening up investment opportunities for all Filipinos,” DragonFi CEO Jon Carlo Lim said in a statement.

“This initiative specifically targets Maya users who are new to investing, addressing the fact that only 1.8 percent of the total working population currently invests in Philippine stocks,” Lim added.

Maya, which has around 50 million users, introduced Maya Stocks in December 2023, allowing its customers to invest in more than 280 firms listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE).

The PSE has long been pushing for financial inclusion and accessibility to the stock market through online platforms that are available to various age and income groups in hopes of increasing volumes.

Months before the launch of Maya Stocks, competitor GCash unveiled GStocks PH, which boosted the number of online stock market accounts in 2023.

Data from the PSE show that the number of stock market accounts climbed by 11.3 percent to 1.91 million last year.

Of the total, 80 percent or 1.53 million were online accounts.

Nearly half of all investors were composed of those aged 30 to 44. They were followed by 18- to 29-year-olds at 21.5 percent.

Those earning less than P500,000 annually accounted for 76.7 percent of investors, PSE data showed.