BSP greenlights 2 more e-money issuers

MANILA,Philippines — Two more electronic money issuers received the green light from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) amid the rising number of Filipinos embracing electronics payments.

Melchor Plabasan, director of the BSP’s Technology Risk and Innovation Supervision Department, said the Monetary Board has approved the registration of Tagcash Ltd. Inc. and MarCoPay Inc.

Tagcash, created in 2014 in Philippines, builds apps, websites and application program interface (APIs) to allow easy creation, management, and usage of Fiat or private currencies for various uses such as payments, rewards or in app game currency. It has offices in Singapore and India.

On the other hand, MarCoPay is a partnership between the Delgado family’s Transnational Diversified Group (TDG) and Japanese shipping giant NYK Line that intends to use quick response (QR) code for pre-boarding, salary disbursements, on-board purchases, and money transfers.

The BSP has issued closed to 50 EMI licenses including 30 banks and 19 non-banks.

Other non-bank EMIs include ridesharing giant Grab’s GPay Network Philippines. SpeedyPay, OmniPay, Metrobank Card, G-Xchange, Alipay Philippines, Infoserve, Lulu-Phils Internatonal Exchange, PayMaya Philippines, True Money Philippines, DCPay Philippines, Wisecard e-Money Philippines, Starpay, Zybi Tech, Airpay Technologies Philippines, Togetech, and Ecashpay Asia.

Latest data from the central bank showed e-money transactions went up by 22.4 percent to P628.9 billion in the first half of the year from P513.8 billion in the same period last year.

The increase was achieved despite the 19.2 percent decline in the number of inflow and outflow transactions to 234.01 million from January to June this year compared to 289.49 million in the same period last year.    

E-money transactions coursed through banks inched up four percent to P459.86 billion from P442.23 million, while those coursed through non-banks more than doubled to P169.02 billion from P71.6 billion.

Plabasan attributed the minimal transaction growth for e-money transactions coursed through banks to the fact that e-money products are competing against other services offered such as debit and credit cards.