THE number of Filipinos with deposit accounts continued to rise in the second quarter of 2021, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced on Tuesday.
In his speech at the Philippine Economic Briefing (PEB), BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno said regular deposit accounts rose to 83.1 million as of end-June last year. This is 3 million higher than its level in end-2020.
Meanwhile, for basic deposit accounts, (BDA) the number of accounts hit 7.4 million at the end of the second quarter of 2021, up from the 6.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The BSP introduced the BDA Framework in 2018 to encourage more Filipinos to open bank accounts. It is a low-cost, no-frills account that features an initial deposit requirement capped at P100 and simplified identification requirements to open an account. It has no maintaining balance and dormancy charges.
These BDAs are accounts designed by the BSP to encourage more people to open bank accounts and promote financial inclusion. Among its key features include simplified know your customer (KYC) processes to open, no maintaining balance, no dormancy charges, and 0 percent reserve requirement for the bank.
The rise in both regular accounts and BDAs brings the total number of bank accounts in the country to 90.5 million in the second quarter of 2021.
For active electronic money (e-money) accounts, no data has been released yet for 2021. The number of e-money accounts in 2020 hit 34.7 million, almost double the 17.9 accounts in the year before due to the pandemic.
The governor also said the country is currently on track to meeting the target of digitizing about 50 percent of total payments in the country by 2023.
As of end-2020, the share of monthly digital payments volume reached 20.1 percent, slightly exceeding the BSP’s target of “20 percent in 2020” set in 2015.