The short answer
Palawan Pawnshop is owned by the Castro family. Bobby Castro did not found it; he and his wife Angelita bought an existing one-branch pawnshop from the Rodriguez family of Roxas, Palawan for about P40,000 and opened it under their own name in Puerto Princesa on 17 August 1985. It now has more than 3,800 branches. Since early 2024 their eldest son, Karlo Castro, has been President and CEO, with Bobby Castro as Chairman.
Palawan Pawnshop is one of the most recognisable brands in the Philippines. There are more than 3,800 branches, and if you count agent partners the network is larger still. In most towns it is the only place within walking distance where you can turn a gold ring into cash or collect money a relative sent from Manila.
What surprised me when I started digging is that Bobby Castro, the man everyone associates with the company, did not start it. He bought it when it had a single branch and no reputation, and he had no idea how to run a pawnshop. The story of how it got from there to here is much stranger than the corporate version suggests, and it starts with a man who had been shot in the head.
Who owns Palawan Pawnshop?
Palawan Pawnshop is privately owned by the Castro family, through the Palawan Group of Companies. It was built by Bobby L. Castro and his wife Angelita Maligalig-Castro, who acquired it in 1985 and ran it together from the single original branch.
The leadership has changed hands recently, and this is the part most write-ups still get wrong. In early 2024, the couple’s eldest son Karlo Castro took over as President and CEO of the Palawan Group. Bobby Castro did not leave; he moved up to Chairman. So if you read that Bobby Castro runs Palawan Pawnshop, that has not been true for a couple of years now.
Did Bobby Castro found Palawan Pawnshop?
No, and he is unusually direct about this himself. The pawnshop already existed. It had been operating since the early 1980s, opened by the Rodriguez family of Roxas, Palawan. Castro bought the business from them in 1985.
The cleanest comparison is Ray Kroc and McDonald’s. The McDonald brothers built the original restaurant; Kroc bought it and turned it into something the brothers never imagined. Castro is the Ray Kroc of Palawan Pawnshop. He did not have the idea. He had the ambition to scale it, and roughly four decades of patience.
Who is Bobby Castro?
Before any of this, Castro was a full-time activist.
He studied at Philippine Science High School and went on to UP Diliman, but he and Angelita spent the 1970s in the political movement rather than in class. He was first arrested in 1975 and detained at Camp Crame. He was released, and he went straight back to the movement.
Two years later he was arrested again. This time it followed an encounter with the military in which he was shot in the head and the right shoulder, and he was detained at Camp Olivas for about a year. He and Angelita had met as students and were both in the movement; they married after his release and decided to go home to Puerto Princesa.
Once there, he took odd jobs and tried a run of small ventures: selling cloth diapers, fish and wild honey, and at one point running a wood sash factory and a furniture store. He earned a business education degree from Palawan Teacher’s College while he and Angelita were raising their first two children. In interviews he has been blunt that there was no entrepreneurial history in his family at all, not his parents and not his grandparents.
The thing that changed his situation was a building. His father, a retired colonel, secured a loan from the Development Bank of the Philippines and combined it with his retirement fund to put up a commercial building in Puerto Princesa. It held rented commercial space, a small hotel, a restaurant and a bar. They called it CIRCON, after his grandparents Ciriaco and Concepcion. Bobby managed it.
How did Bobby Castro buy Palawan Pawnshop for P40,000?
Managing CIRCON paid him a salary, but he wanted something of his own. In 1985 a small pawnshop nearby came up for sale, and it happened to be the only business available at the time. Asked later why he chose the pawnshop trade, his answer was that there was no reason. It was what was on the market. He had no clue how to operate one.
The asking price was around P40,000. His father had exactly that much in the bank, and they used it. Castro has said that once the purchase went through there was nothing left, and the family had to start saving again from zero. The couple opened their first branch under the Palawan Pawnshop name in Puerto Princesa on 17 August 1985.
Neither of them knew the business, so Angelita went to Manila to study jewellery appraisal and came back to run the counter. For the early stretch it was just the two of them and one branch, and it earned roughly P5,000 a month.
That did not bother him, because the plan did not depend on the pawnshop paying him. He was still drawing a salary from CIRCON, and that salary fed the family. Everything the pawnshop earned went straight back into the pawnshop. As long as it did not lose money, nothing came out. When enough had accumulated, he opened another branch. Then he did it again.
The second branch came in 1987, the third in Narra. Thirteen years in, there were more than a dozen branches across Palawan.
How did Palawan Pawnshop grow so fast?
Two things turned a provincial chain into a national one, and neither was planned.
The first was a ferry. Negros Navigation ran a route out of Puerto Princesa to Iloilo and Bacolod, which made the crossing to the Visayas practical. Castro had a relative based in Negros who could act as a guide on the ground, so they opened a branch there.
Demand in Negros turned out to be far higher than expected, and that created a logistics problem. A pawnshop needs physical cash on hand to give people, so the Negros branch needed cash shipped to it constantly. Someone made the obvious suggestion: if we are already moving money to that branch, why not let other people move money through us too?
That is where Palawan Express Pera Padala came from. It was not a strategic initiative. It was a workaround for a cash-supply problem, and it turned into the reason most Filipinos know the brand at all.
The second thing was a deliberate choice about where to open. Competitors passed on towns they judged too small or too rural. Palawan Pawnshop went in anyway, on the reasoning that being first in a town nobody else wanted was worth more than being third in a city everybody did. Combine that with a remittance service people actually needed and you get the branch count.
Castro has said the moment it felt real was when friends started messaging him from provinces in Mindanao to say they had just walked past a Palawan Pawnshop. There is a particular pride Palaweños take in seeing the name of their province on signage across the country.
I understand the feeling. I am from Iloilo, and every time I pass a restaurant in Manila selling La Paz batchoy, La Paz being a district of Iloilo City, I get a small unearned sense of ownership over it.
Is Palawan Pawnshop the same as Palawan Express?
They are the same company, not the same service. Palawan Pawnshop is the pawnbroking business, where you leave an item as collateral for a loan. Palawan Express Pera Padala is the remittance service for sending and receiving money. Both run out of the same branches under the Palawan Group of Companies, which is why the names are used almost interchangeably in conversation.
What is PalawanPay?
For a long time the company’s strength was also its ceiling: to use it, you had to physically go somewhere. When the pandemic locked people in their homes, that stopped being a strength. GCash and the other wallets took on enormous numbers of new users while Palawan branches were out of reach. The company has described that stretch as a wake-up call.
PalawanPay, its own e-wallet, launched in 2022. It handles remittances, bills, load, and pawn renewals from the phone. When I first wrote about this, it was brand new and I said I was curious whether it would work.
It worked. PalawanPay now reports 23 million users, with about 1.8 million having activated virtual cards.
The advantage it has over a pure digital wallet is the thing that once looked like a liability. Plenty of Filipinos still need physical cash and still do not have a bank account. A GCash balance has to be routed to a bank or a convenience store to become money in your hand. A PalawanPay balance can be withdrawn at any of more than 3,800 Palawan branches, which in much of the country is closer than the nearest bank. The company calls this combination "BrickTech", the physical network and the app working as one.
Where is Palawan Pawnshop headed next?
The group marked 40 years in 2025, and it has spent 2026 pushing well past pawnbroking. In August it launched "Palawan for All", a platform pulling together digital payments, microinsurance, credit, business tools and savings products. It partnered with RCBC on PalaSave, a digital savings product aiming for a million users in its first year. Google Pay support went live, Apple Pay is expected shortly, and physical payment cards are targeted for a November to December 2026 rollout.
The strategic bet is coherent: use four decades of branches in places banks never bothered with as the distribution network for a full financial ecosystem. It is the same instinct that made them open in towns competitors wrote off, applied to a different decade.
Not bad for a business that a former political detainee bought for P40,000 because it was the only thing for sale.