The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) will launch Bills Payment, Request-to-Pay and Direct Debit digital payment streams before June this year, according to a BSP official.

“Based on our conversations with the industry, we should be able to get these off the ground in the first half (of 2022) until maybe the third quarter of this year,” said BSP Assistant Governor Edna C. Villa.

Villa added that “fingers-crossed we will be able to do all of this and get everyone digitalized.”

The interoperable Bills Payment and Request-to-Pay facilities will run through InstaPay while the Direct Debit is via PESONet.

The BSP originally announced in April 2021 that of the three e-payment channels, the Bills Payment and Request-to-Pay will be launched first, supposedly in the third and fourth quarter, respectively, last year but there were delays in the testing stage.

The Request-to-Pay facility allows payers to effectively manage recurring, non-urgent bills such as rents, loan amortizations and insurance premiums. The PESONet has recently adopted a multiple batch settlement or MBS scheme.

The Bills Payment facility, meantime, allows customers to pay their bills even if the transaction accounts of the customer and the biller are in different payment service providers. The facility will enable a more efficient collection among billers.

As for Direct Debit, customers can better manage their recurring payments such as monthly rentals by simply authorizing the payees to pull funds from the account of the payors.

The BSP has two goals of shifting or converting at least 50 percent of all retail transactions into digital by next year, and to get 70 percent of the population to be part of the financial system, also by 2023. This was BSP’s objectives when it crafted its Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap (DPTR) for 2020 to 2023.

So far, by end-2020, the share of digital payments to total financial transactions have increased to 20.1 percent from 14 percent in 2019 and only one percent in 2013 before the DPTR. About 53 percent of Filipino adults have been onboarded as of the first quarter of 2021 from just 29 percent in 2019.

The BSP is closely collaborating with the payments industry led by Philippine Payments Management Inc. to implement the PESONet-MBS for person-to-business or P2B in business-to-business or B2B payments.

With the launch of the PESONet-MBS last Jan. 24, the BSP expects an increase in digital transactions this year.

Last year, PESONet volume grew by 26 percent year-on-year to seven million transactions while the peso value also increased by 37 percent year-on-year to P502 billion.

InstaPay transactions in 2021 also rose by 47 percent year-on-year to 45 million while peso value also went up by 64 percent year-on-year to P289 billion in 2021.

Currently, the average monthly PESONet transfers stand at around P380 billion. As of end-December 2021, there are 94 BSFIs participating in PESONet.

The increased usage of digital payments was largely driven by high-frequency, low value retail transactions such as person-to-merchant or P2M payments and person-to-person or P2P payments such as electronic fund transfers.

Based on BSP data, QR Ph P2P transactions are growing by an average of 152 percent on a quarterly basis in terms of volume. Value-wise, it is growing by an average of 255 percent per quarter.

After P2P facility, the BSP launched QR Ph P2M via InstaPay last year for merchants and businesses.