NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

By Lorenzo Kyle Subido

By 2020, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) wants 20 percent of all transactions in the country to be electronic, a big jump from only one percent in 2015. It’s part of the central bank’s National Strategy for Financial Inclusion, as digitizing financial services enables greater and easier access for the majority of the population that remains unbanked.

For its part, the BSP has announced a number of projects and initiatives to meet this goal. Most notable of these is a memorandum issued last September that required all banks and non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs) that offer online banking services to make interbank electronic fund transfers available by end-November, which will be done through the new automated clearing houses PESONet and InstaPay.

Photo courtesy of Bruce MacDonald.