The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said on Thursday, March 2, that it has began the review of e-payment transactions and to study how soon it can work with both banks and non-banks in reducing e-payment transaction fees.
The BSP said it is currently in talks with the banking sector on “measures to lower or waive transaction fees for small e-payments to make financial digitalization more inclusive”.
This was a follow up on BSP Governor Felipe M. Medalla’s statement last week reiterating what BSP had wanted to do since 2022, which was to cut e-payment fees for certain transactions. Reducing the cost of e-payments is part of the BSP’s 2020-2023 Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap 2020-2023.
Medalla said on two recent occasion, on Feb. 24 and on Feb. 27, that he is confident that both the BSP and all digital transaction players can come up with ways to bring down the costs of e-payments as soon as possible.
“I am sure that the Bangko Sentral and our partners in the banking system will be able to find a cost-sharing system that excludes payments from fees, provided they are made below a certain number of transactions,” said Medalla.
He added that to make digitalization more inclusive – “(one way) is to make small transactions free of charge so that low-income households can be encouraged to use digital payments.”
“If the value of the transaction is small and the charge is 15 pesos, for example, that fee is quite large relative to the transaction,” he said.
The BSP is currently supervising 70 registered and licensed e-money issuers or EMI-Banks and EMI non-bank financial institutions or EMI-NBFIs. Of the 70 EMIs, 29 are EMI-Banks or owned by banks while 41 are EMI-NBFIs or owned by non-banks such GCash, PayMaya and GrabPay.
As of end-2021, there are 27.5 million Filipinos with e-money accounts compared to 5.7 million in 2019.
Last month, the BSP issued a new EMI circular which raised the required minimum capital for an e-money firm with a 12-month large-scale operations of P25 billion or more.
The minimum capital for these operations is now P200 million from the previous P100 million. Meanwhile, the minimum capital requirement for small-scale EMIs is P100 million.
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