The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’s (BSP) move to create a national QR standard for offline mobile digital payments changes the game for financial technology (fintech) players and banks alike.
Globe Fintech Innovations Inc. Vice Chairman Ernest L. Cu said with this move, the battle for the tech’s usage now lies on user experience, no longer pervasiveness.
Globe Fintech, which operates GCash, has been aggressively promoting to merchants its QR payments product. Today, it has about 70,000 merchants onboard its QR platform.
“What it all means is that our QR merchants will be available to everybody. If it goes the way it’s going to go, which is a single standard, it opens up to everybody what we have and they open up what they have to us. From that point on, it’s all about customer experiences. It’s about having the money in your wallet,” he said in an interview.
Deputy Governor Chuchi G. Fonacier of the Central Bank’s Financial Supervision Sector said the BSP aims to issue a regulation for QR payments next quarter.
“We’re now working with the industry for a national QR standard. We should only have one national standard. It’s coming up in the third quarter,” she said.
Currently, fintech companies and banks have different QR payment schemes. For instance, a merchant which has been enrolled in the QR payments system of GCash, PayMaya and BDO has three separate QR codes for offline digital payments.
However, with a national standard, that same merchant will only need one QR code for its store. Having one QR code for merchants already accepting this form of payment opens up the market to new players, GrabPay and Coins for example.
“We’re really pushing for interoperability. It should be easy if there’s only one national standard for QR. That will enable a lot of small transactions. Even the farthest area in the Philippines can do payments or buy something,” Fonacier said.
She added that this will also be beneficial for tourists, especially those that use mobile digital payments as their main wallet.
China, for example, has a huge QR penetration. In the Philippines, Chinese visitors consistently rank second in the list of top tourists per month.
Globe Fintech President Anthony Thomas said his group supports this move by the Central Bank, even as this means that competition may take advantage of the company’s already-pervasive QR reach.
“We’re committed to interoperability to make it available to everyone. It also expands the number of users that have access to financial technology,” he told the BusinessMirror.
Thomas noted that his group may suggest to the Central Bank methods, systems, and processes to ensure the security and effectiveness of the future uniform QR system.
“We’re actively engaging with them to avoid mistakes of the past in interoperable models,” he said.
GCash is one of the largest e-money operators in the Philippines with 20 million accounts in its system.