Smart Money, the 2000s rival of GCash before it became the behemoth that we know it now, is coming back. Smart’s own payment gateway gained a lot of traction back in the 2000s and was eventually shelved in favor of PayMaya in 2016, created under PLDT’s Fintech arm, Voyager Innovations. Unfortunately, Maya hasn’t had the consumer adoption that GCash has had in the Philippines, with the former carving out its niche in merchant acquisition vs the latter’s consumer-focused efforts.

Why would Smart revive a service that they already shelved in favor of Maya all those years ago? The most obvious is that GCash needs a legitimate challenger. The market is ripe for disruption in the e-wallet space, and there are enough users who haven’t been happy with GCash’s perceived failures in the past that might make a second player possible.

What about Maya? Well, the brand has transitioned from just an e-wallet to a full digital bank, and it’s obvious that it’s happy with the niche it’s carved out in the merchant space. Maya might not be as well known as GCash, but it does substantial numbers in supplying merchants with POS as well as its other banking products. Maya is also no longer in a position to challenge GCash in the space it currently dominates in, because that entails a branding and marketing effort that would cost millions, if not billions, without a guarantee of dethroning the current champion and without erasing the gains they’ve already made in the aforementioned merchant space.

There are also rumors that PLDT isn’t happy about the fact that their stake in Voyager Innovations, the parent firm of Maya and PLDT’s fintech arm, has been diluted so much that Smart has very little or no say in how the digital bank does business. That’s not something you want when you want to go up against a competitor whose name has become a verb in the common lexicon.

So now we have Smart Money. It makes sense–the brand has been dormant long enough that many of the issues associated with it before it transitioned to PayMaya have mostly disappeared, but is still fresh enough that there’s still enough significant positive consumer recall with people which makes marketing it a little easier. Between an all-out marketing blitz to introduce a new brand and a campaign to tell people that the service that they fuzzily remember was a good thing back when they were teens or young adults, the latter is cheaper and easier to mount than the latter.

Will Smart Money have what it takes to compete with GCash? We’ll have to see. As I mentioned earlier, if Smart Money can give lower merchant fees, and have better uptime and reliability than the incumbent, then it’s possible that they’ll be able to make a dent.