BSP Keeps up With Digital Currency Pilot Testing

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is pursuing efforts to remodel the Philippines from a cash-heavy to a cash-light economy to be able to reach the deadline that was set for shifting half of the retail transactions to digital channels.

BSP Governor Felipe Medalla has mentioned that the BSP is planning to issue a merchant acquiring and aggregation framework to aid the further digitalization of merchant payments. Digital merchant payments total over 70% of the total retail payments on a monthly basis.

The BSP is likewise wrapping up a cooperative oversight framework that stops regulatory arbitrage from duplications, inefficiencies, gaps, and consistencies in the regulations of several supervising bodies.

Aside from this, BSP Governor Medalla stated that the BSP is targeting to launch other payment channels such as Request to Pay and InstaPay Debit Pull. BSP has begun the pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Governor Medalla mentions that this is a major capacity-building activity for both the financial industry and the BSP.

“We will not go into retail CBDC. We will be in wholesale CBDC, which hopefully, will also facilitate cross-border transfers. And of course, the dream is for any ASEAN citizen can use their phone to make payments wherever he is in the ASEAN,”

BSP launched CBDCPh, to build hands-on knowledge and organizational capacity of key aspects of CBDC that are significate for a use case around tackling issues in the national payment system.

Project CBDCPh is managed by an intersectoral project management team to secure coverage of all critical operational areas.

Source: Philstar