Comparing the volume of digital payments to total retail payments, the Philippines has seen a dramatic increase of 30.3 percent—an up from what was 20.1% a year before, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)’s recent data on e-payments.
A positive prospect, BSP Governor Felipe Medalla claims that the trend is closer to the institution’s objective of “converting at least 50% to digital form by the end of 2023,” adhering to the “BSP Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap”.
Making big contributors to the growing adoption of digital payments are peer-to-peer (P2P) remittances, merchant payments, and payments of employee salaries and wages, all of which are marked as being high-frequency, low-value retail transactions.
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Out of the aforementioned, P2P remittances gathered the largest development at 268.6%, followed by the payments of employee salaries and wages at 170.2%, and lastly, merchant payments at 43.8 %.
While the occurrence of the global health crisis played a significant role in the trend, people’s widening access to transactional accounts and shift to digital payments were also influential.