24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas walks through payment methods for hiring Filipino specialists: Easy Pay, Wise, Remitly, GCash, PayMaya, Payoneer, and PayPal. Skip PayPal for its bad exchange rates and wire transfers for new hires. Gusto works better for bigger teams.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. Today's episode 204, follow up on Philippines banking and paying your OFS. So a while back, asked about banking in the Philippines, I talked about how their systems work and I got a bunch of comments on social media about how other people handle payments. And this was kind of interesting to me. And the really cool thing about these comments is these are from employers who've been doing this for a long time and this is a couple of different ways that they're doing this. So TJ said, I use remitly. It goes right into GCash also offers cash delivery depending on location. Ray said you can use the Wise app and Pay to their GCash account, among others. So I just wanted to. Let's just talk about this for a second. So regarding what system you use, some of you are overwhelmed by this. Like, should I use PayPal or Western Union or Easy Pay or Payoneer? Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter what you use. It doesn't matter. You can pay them through whatever system works best for you. We created Easy Pay because it integrates with your online jobs account. We were able to beat up payoneer a little bit in terms of their exchange rate and their fees, and we got rid of all the fees and the exchange rate's really great. That's why we use Easy Pay. But for you, whatever's easiest is what you should use. E Wallet apps in the Philippines make this all super easy. They can use GCash or PayMaya or there's also banking apps or like bank to bank transfers like Gusto or Remitly and Wise make it. It's just not that hard to get a bank account in the Philippines. They can get the money out. It doesn't really matter how you pay them. They can get the money. Now, there is a consideration in all of this. I really can't recommend using PayPal to pay people. Their exchange rate is terrible. And from what I've seen, the exchange rate that they publish, almost always low or higher than the actual exchange rate that they're going to use to send the money. So PayPal is the one system that like, if you need to use this, if your OFS prefers it, fine, whatever. But the exchange rate there sucks and it affects them. Like they're just, they're getting less money and that small amount of less money for someone in the Philippines, it matters. Outside of that, there's no need to overcomplicate things. Except I know some of you want to overcomplicate this, so let me, let me talk about that. So if you have a newly hired Filipino worker, you use a payment system like Easy Pay or Wise or Remitly or whatever. Avoid direct, avoid a wire transfer they don't want. They're scared of a wire transfer. They've been told over and over again that's how people get scammed. So, and a wire transfer for you is going to cost you, I don't know, $25 or $40 extra, which is silly. Although it's pretty easy. It's an easy first thing if that's what you want to do, but they're going to be scared of it. Also, Easy Pay, Wise, PayPal, Remitly, whatever. They can all send money directly to GCash, which makes easy for your worker to get to get money out. GCASH is their mobile, is the Philippines Mobile Wallet. It's accepted basically everywhere. It's super easy to get to use it, to use their salary. Once you've established trust with your ofs, then you can pay them however you want. Again, not that complicated. And then as a last thing, so I mentioned Gusto before and I just want to talk about it really quickly. Gusto is intended to be like a payroll service. And the only issue with Gusto is that they require you to have a domestic contractor before you can add an international contractor. So if you're looking for like a payment system just for your ofs, Gusto is probably not the best way to go. But if you're going to have a whole bunch of people, Gusto might be, it might be a really good way of handling the payroll, especially if you have people in, in the U.S. also, I know that I've had a couple customers just rave about how they like Gusto. So if you have a whole bunch of people, great. Otherwise, like EasyPay or Wise or Remitly are just super, super easy options.
