More Filipinos are fast becoming digital savvy as one of every three retail payments went digital in 2021 according to the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).
At the height of the lockdowns, Filipinos used various fintech services to pay and transact in the safety of their homes said the BSP.
Digital payments grew to 30.1 percent in 2021 compared to 20.1 percent in 2020. In terms of value, digital payments totaled 44.1 percent which was also up from 26.8 percent the previous year.
Filipinos increasingly used e-payments for merchant payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) remittances and business payments of salaries and wages to employees. These are high-frequency, low-value retail transactions accordion to the BSP.
Merchant payments increased by 43.8 percent in volume, while P2P remittances grew by 268.6 percent.
Transactions for salaries and wages, meanwhile, grew by 170.2 percent during the period when most Filipinos were working from home. This indicates that for salary disbursements, businesses are transitioning from cash to digital fund transfers to bank or e-money accounts.
The big rise in account-to-account electronic fund transfers show the shifting preference of consumers for digital modes for payments.
The BSP wants to drive at least 50 percent of retail payment transactions to digital form by the end of 2023, under the BSP Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap.
