A fake 'Fuse Lending' ran a lending site on GCash's old brand name — SEC shut it

In January 2025 Fuse Lending Inc., the lending arm inside GCash — the Philippines' dominant e-wallet, backed by Ayala's Mynt — formally renamed itself Fuse Financing Inc., updating its registration and license on January 30, 2025. The old name briefly sat unused. By mid-year, an unrelated group was operating a lending website as 'Fuse Lending, Inc.'

The real Fuse Financing filed a complaint on July 22, 2025, flagging the impostor site. The SEC's Financing and Lending Companies Department found that 'Fuse Lending' was not registered as a corporation, partnership or one-person corporation at all, and held none of the secondary licenses Republic Act No. 9474 requires for lending. On July 31, 2025 the SEC ordered the entity, its owners, operators and agents to stop all lending activity, citing the consumer-protection law RA 11765 too.

The order read less like a punishment than an amputation: with the site still live, the Commission found stopping it necessary 'not only to penalize the company but also to prevent fraud, injury, or harm to the public and financial consumers.' The impostor had needed no brand of its own — the borrowed name was the customer acquisition.

No fine disclosed. The CDO ended the whole operation; GCash had to warn users that the impostor had no ties to its lending arm.

A rename orphans the old corporate name. In lending, the name is the trust: borrowers search it to confirm the lender is real, so a vacated name keeps working for whoever claims it next.

The rename created a window — January 30 to July — in which the legitimate arm and the impostor shared one name, and only one of them was regulated.

Unlicensed online lending scales on distribution and borrowed credibility, not on licenses; by the time a regulator proves violations, the site has already lent.

Brand monitoring is a compliance function, not marketing. Fuse Financing caught the impostor itself and filed within days — but only after the site was live.

A corporate rename orphans the old name — in lending, the name is the trust. Guard the vacated name like an asset, and file the complaint the day a squatter moves in.

On August 13, 2025 GCash publicly clarified it had 'no ties' to the fraudulent Fuse Lending and that its sole legitimate arm operated only inside the GCash app. The same sweep caught Sumulong Financing Inc., suspended for 60 days for running its Fundly platform without an approved business-plan amendment. By July 1, 2026 the SEC and Fuse Financing had turned the episode into a nationwide financial-literacy campaign on spotting unlicensed lenders.