Digital payments nearing 50% of all transactions

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) remains confident that it will achieve its goal of shifting at least 50 percent of all payment transactions in digital form by end-2023.

BSP Deputy Governor Mamerto E. Tangonan said preliminary numbers prove that in 2022, digital or e-payment transactions have exceeded the 2021 migration, which was 30.3 percent of all payments in digital form.

Tangonan said “indications” show that “it will surpass” last year’s 30.3 percent.

“We’re doing the measurement right now, (it’s) ongoing for 2022,” he said. The numbers however are still being tallied.

“We will come up with it sometime in July and then we will report it,” he added.

Last week, BSP Governor Felipe M. Medalla said the share of digital transactions in total payments “has been growing steadily” with both InstaPay and PESONet. Also, more people are using the QR Ph code for payments while all payment service providers still using non-QR PH codes will shift to QR Ph by July this year.

The 30.3 percent e-payments as of end-2021 in terms of volume is higher compared to 20.1 percent in 2020. The lockdowns and mobility restrictions were the trigger to convince millions of Filipinos to switch to digital payments or online transactions.

Under the Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap, about 50 percent of payments in terms of volume should be digitalized by 2023.

The BSP was able to migrate 30.3 percent of transactions into digital form because of merchant payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) remittances, and business payments of salaries and wages to employees. All of these payment streams are high-frequency and low value retail transactions.

Last year, to further increase the use of e-payments, the BSP launched the QR Ph person-to-merchant (P2M) payment facility which was cost-effective since it does not require expensive point of sale or data capture terminals.

Basically, the QR Ph P2M is an interoperable digital payments between customers and merchants even if they maintain accounts with different financial service providers. It may also be used for bills payment in the future.

To help spread QR Ph use across the country, the BSP introduced the Paleng-QR Ph Plus program in mid-2022 with the Department of Interior Local Government to help local government units bring QR Ph to public markets and transport hubs for tricycles.

The BSP also launched Bills Pay Ph in 2022, one of three crucial payment streams to shift 50 percent of all payments into e-payments. The other two — Request-to-Pay and Direct Debit – are yet to be implemented.

Bills Pay Ph enables digital transactions between accounts from different payment service providers by scanning or uploading the QR Ph person-to-biller (P2B) code, or by manually inputting payment details for the non-QR mode of payment.

based on the BSP’s 2021 Financial Inclusion Survey (FIS), 56 percent of the adult population have financial account ownership, almost double from 29 percent in 2019.

The 56 percent is equivalent to 42.9 million of Filipino adults with transactional accounts. about 77.2 million of the total 110 million Filipinos are adults.

The BSP, which releases the FIS every two years, said the latest number of financial transaction accounts is the highest growth to date. Ownership of a formal account is a basic indicator of financial inclusion.