In the course of two years, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) together with the Philippine Payments Management Inc., (PPMI) are set to launch three e-payment streams to push the use of digital payments in the country.

Revealed during the recent Eastern Communications E-Huddle webinar, the three e-payment streams are: Bills Pay, Request to Pay, and Direct Debit facilities.

Bills Pay seeks to improve the existing fragmented bill payments mechanism for retail customers. This will allow them to pay their electricity, water, and telephone bills even if the accounts of the customer and the biller are with different banks or other financial institutions.

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Request to Pay aims to empower payees to initiate collections by sending a “request to pay” to the payor without the need to provide the account details or the amount. The payor only needs to authorize the collection instruction (by clicking on “approve”, for example) from the payee.

Direct Debit allows customers to better manage recurring payments such as monthly rentals, amortizations, insurance, among others, by simply authorizing the billers to pull funds from the account of payors.

Under the BSP Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap (DPTR) 2020-2023, the BSP aims to convert 50 percent of the volume of retail payments into digital form and onboard 70 percent of Filipino adults onto the formal financial system by 2023.

The PPMI is a key BSP partner for the DPTR and is an industry-led self-governing body that is accredited and overseen by the BSP as a Payment System Management Body in accordance with the National Payment Systems Act.1