The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), with the Bankers Association of the Philippines (BAP) and the Bank Marketing Association of the Philippines (BMAP), has launched “Check-Protect-Report” (CPR), an information campaign to promote cyber hygiene more actively this year.
BSP Governor Felipe M. Medalla said on Monday, Jan. 2, that with increase in digital transactions, the CPR drive “encapsulates” BSP’s push to encourage Filipino consumers to get in the habit of practicing good cyber hygiene. To complement BSP’s cybersecurity awareness drive, the promotion of cyber hygiene practices were started in 2020.
The cyber hygiene habit are practices and steps that users of digital devices and financial services take to ensure online security. The CPR communication campaign is a plain reminder to the public to protect themselves against online scams.
Medalla said the CPR “is expected to enhance financial consumer welfare, further strengthen confidence in the use of electronic payments, and therefore promote growth.”
“Bolstering public trust in the payment system is supportive of the BSP’s goals under the Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap, which aims to digitalize half of the volume of retail payments and onboard 70 percent of Filipino adults to the formal financial system by 2023,” the BSP chief said.
BAP President and the CEO of East West Banking Corp., Antonio C. Moncupa, said on Monday that the industry will continue to closely work with the BSP, other financial regulators, legislaters and law enforcement people to “effectively curtail fraud and the proliferation of cybercrimes.”
“Central to this goal is the protection of the banking public’s hard-earned funds which can only be achieved with the joint effort by the financial institutions, government agencies and the customers themselves,” said Moncupa.
“Our strong collaboration with the BSP and BMAP complements the BAP’s #Cybersafe campaign by providing a platform to keep the banking public abreast and empowered with the knowledge of the ever-evolving schemes of cybercriminals,” he added.
BMAP President Mai Gacilo Sangalang, for her part, said the group has been a partner of both BSP and BAP in the consumer awareness drive and the “vigilance against cybercrime.”
“Cyber criminals have evolved and reinvented scams that are becoming more complex and harder to detect. Further, a social media savvy population makes the country more vulnerable to cyberattacks and fraud incidents. With this, we call on the public to always be vigilant, practice due diligence, and to not be complacent when it comes to cybersecurity,” said Sangalang on Monday.
Basically, as explained by the BSP, the “check” part in CPR is to remind consumers to be careful when sharing information because as they always tell the public, legitimate banks and financial institutions (FIs) will only ask for personal data when they are contacted by their clients.
The “protect” part means safeguarding and not sharing personal data to senders of random text messages or emails, while “report” enjoins financial consumers to urgently inform their banks or FIs about suspicious transactions, said the BSP.
Since 2020, when the BSP first introduced its cyber hygiene information drive, the pandemic and the necessary lockdown and containment measures increased the need for online financial transactions.
In the three years of the pandemic, the BSP said issues and concerns about internet banking, mobile banking and e-money were top concerns as reported through their Consumer Assistance Management System. The issues mainly evolve around fund transfers, crediting funds to recipient accounts, and unauthorized transactions.
Digital literacy is crucial because with the BSP’s digital transformation roadmap, they aim to shift at least 50 percent of retail payment transactions to digital this year. As of end-2021, about 30.1 percent of all payment transactions have migrated into e-payments.