Unbanked penalty.

If a wealthy corporate executive in Makati wants to transfer ₱50,000 to another bank, they open an app on their iPhone. They use InstaPay. It costs them exactly ₱15. They pay a microscopic fraction of a percent in transaction fees.

But if a construction worker in Manila needs to send ₱1,000 to his starving family in the province, he cannot use a bank. He doesn't have an account.

He walks to a neighborhood "Padala" (remittance) center. To send that ₱1,000, he is charged a fee of ₱50.

Welcome to the microeconomics of the Unbanked Penalty.

That ₱50 fee represents a massive 5% tax on the worker's money. It doesn't sound like much until you scale it up. If the corporate executive was forced to pay the exact same 5% rate as the construction worker, their InstaPay transfer would cost them ₱2,500.

Because the poorest Filipinos do not have the formal identification or maintaining balances required to enter the traditional banking system, they are mathematically forced to use physical remittance networks. These financial conglomerates make billions of pesos in pure profit every single year by exploiting the absolute friction of poverty.

The system is perfectly designed: The less money you have, the more expensive it is to move it.