BSP: Digital Payments in the Philippines Surge to 42.1%

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) revealed that digital or e-payments have accounted for 42.1 percent of payment transactions in the Philippines by the end of 2022, marking a significant growth from the 30.3 percent recorded in 2021, according to its 2022 Status of Digital Payments report.

The development comes as the BSP’s Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap aims to achieve a 50% digitalization rate by 2023.

The value of digital payments in terms of total retail payments also grew, reaching 40.1 percent in 2022, amounting to USD78 billion.

Digital transactions have been steadily growing since Filipinos started to shift to the medium en masse during the height of COVID-19 in 2020, also largely due to the increased utilization of both InstaPay and PESONet.

Meanwhile, the adoption of QR PH codes for payments has also seen a surge, with all payment service providers expected to shift to QR Ph codes this month.

The migration to digital payments has been driven by merchant payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) remittances, and business payments for salaries and wages.

These payment streams consist of high-frequency and low-value retail transactions.

Moreover, according to the report, merchant payments have seen a substantial increase of 35.6 percent year-on-year, reaching 1.507 billion transactions in 2022 compared to 1.112 billion in 2021. P2P transfers have also surged by 91.2 percent, totaling 299.7 million transactions last year.

Additionally, salaries and wage payments increased by 41.1 percent to 45.1 million transactions.

The BSP launched the QR Ph person-to-merchant (P2M) payment facility to further boost the adoption of e-payments.

This enables interoperable digital payments between customers and merchants, even if they hold accounts with different financial service providers. The BSP also introduced the Paleng-QR Ph Plus program in partnership with the Department of Interior Local Government to bring QR Ph to public markets and transport hubs.

BSP Deputy Governor Bernadette Romulo-Puyat said during a recent interview with reporters that more local government units have said that they are willing to adopt the new digital payment system in their jurisdictions, which will further boost the Filipinos’ choices of payment for daily transactions. (GFB)