THE Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) remains optimistic the ubiquity level of electronic transactions would exceed its target as the Central Bank aims for greater efficiency of channels for delivering banking and financial services.
BSP Governor Benjamin E. Diokno told the BusinessMirror that he is optimistic the 20-percent target set by the National Retail Payment System (NRPS) will be reached before the year 2020 deadline.
“We will exceed that, I believe, because the 20 percent was done last 2015. So they [monetary officials] are very optimistic we will exceed that [by 2020]. We have commissioned a group to study that,” Diokno said last Friday.
The NRPS, which is a regulatory framework of the BSP in line with institutionalizing retail digital payments in the country, includes two automated clearing houses (ACH). One is the “Philippine EFT [electronic fund transfer] System and Operations Network,” or PesoNet, while another is InstaPay.
Launched in November 2017, PesoNet is a batch EFT credit-payment scheme, which can be considered an electronic alternative to the paper-based check system.
InstaPay is an EFT service that allows customers to transfer funds almost instantly between accounts of participating BSP-supervised banks and nonbank e-money issuers in the Philippines. InstaPay was launched last year and allows real-time transactions for individuals, companies and even government agencies to send and receive funds of up to P50,000 per transaction a day.
Based on the BSP’s report titled “Financial Inclusion in the Philippines,” the number of electronic transaction inflows rose to 9.2 percent in 2017 reaching 73 million from the 67 million transactions recorded in 2016.
In terms of outflows, the number of transactions increased by 6 percent reaching 317 million in 2017 from the 2016 level of 299 million.
The amount of transaction inflows for 2017 totaled P481.7 billion, which also posted an uptick of 0.8 percent compared to the P477.7 billion reported in 2016.
The amount of transaction outflows for 2017 also recorded a 0.6-percent increase amounting to P481 billion coming from P478.4 billion in 2016.
Although the number of cashless transactions and amount has posted increases, the BSP report pointed out that the number of e-money accounts for 2017 registered a decline of 24.1 percent totaling 8.6 million from the 2016 level of 11.4 million.
The BSP launched the NRPS last year, aiming to drive the growth of electronic payments in the country from 1 percent to at least 20 percent by 2020.