GCash, a fintech platform, has transformed its digital infrastructure into an AI-native, hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem to drive financial inclusion for millions of Filipinos. By partnering with Red Hat, the company is moving beyond standard cloud services to a more advanced architecture designed for speed, security, and massive scale.
The journey began in 2018. As GCash sought to break away from rigid, “monolithic” systems, the team pivoted toward microservices architecture. At the time, the move was born out of necessity.
“When we were trying to implement microservices, open source was a necessity for us,” said Nico Alina, assistant vice president at GCash. “A lot of it really boils down to speed and cost efficiency.”
However, as the platform grew by 2x to 3x daily during the pandemic, the infrastructure team faced a massive challenge managing the compute power required. By 2022, majority GCash’s workloads were in the cloud, specifically based in Singapore. To address latency and standardize their architecture, GCash launched a hybrid cloud strategy to bring data and workloads back to the Philippines.
While open source offers flexibility, many enterprises hesitate due to a lack of technical safety nets.
“Enterprises are not that confident with open source solutions because of the lack of support when needed,” said Djang Granados, country manager of Red Hat Philippines.
Red Hat bridges this gap by taking community-driven projects and strengthening them for enterprise use.
“Our engineers participate in the community to make sure there are ongoing projects built over time by millions of community practitioners,” Granados said. “Red Hat integrates these projects within our existing portfolio, making sure they are validated and certified to run at Red Hat.”
For GCash, this meant moving from community tools like Kubernetes and Rancher to Red Hat OpenShift. The move allowed GCash to consolidate three separate service teams into a unified deployment process.
Today, GCash is leveraging this foundation to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its layers of operations.
“We really want to be an AI-native, hybrid multi-cloud financial services organization,” Alina said. “We are even looking at agentic AI in the future to optimize our business processes.”