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The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is extending for another month the waiver of fees on fund transfers for users of its Philippine Payment and Settlement System or PhilPaSSplus.
This means the BSP will not charge PhilPaSSplus fees until end-January 2023 after the previous suspension expired on Dec. 30, 2022.
A memo (Memorandum No. M-2022-053), signed by BSP Managing Director Mary Anne P. Lim on Dec. 16, stated the BSP “re-extends the waiver of PhilPaSSplus fees until the last business day of January 2023.” Lim is the chairperson of the Real Time Gross Settlement Management Committee of the BSP.
“Please make sure that this economic relief redounds to the benefit of financial consumers by keeping the fees for electronic payment services such as InstaPay, PESONet, and QRPh reasonable,” said Lim.
InstaPay and PESONet are automated clearing houses established under the National Retail Payment System. PESONet was first introduced in 2017 and InstaPay a year later in 2018. Meantime, QRPh is the country’s QR code standard based on a global standard for secure payments.
PhilPaSSplus is BSP’s real time gross settlement (RTGS) system which it owns and operate. It processes and settles banks’ interbank high value payment transactions.
The BSP has waived PhilPaSSplus fees since April 2020 as part of its time-bound relief measures to banks during the pandemic.
The BSP suspended PhilPaSSplus fees on six types of transactions such as interbank, the peso-leg of US dollar trades and government securities trades, Philippine Clearing House Corp. (PCHC) transactions, automated teller machines or ATM transactions and the manual processing of interbank transactions.
Pre-pandemic, PhilPaSSplus fees for interbank transactions were already free for transaction of P100 or less. For the peso-leg of US trades a P5 fee was charged up to P500,000 transaction value and P10 from P500,001 to P1 million.
PCHC transactions before Covid-19 was charged P400 for transaction value of P40 million and above, while the peso-leg of government securities transactions and manual interbank transactions have ad valorem fees.
Because of the suspended fees, the BSP’s revenues from PhilPaSSplus declined by 74.3 percent as of end-September 2022 from end-June.
Based on end-third quarter figures, the total number of PhilPaSSplus transactions reached 363,277 or 5.5 percent higher than the previous quarter’s 344,330 transactions.
In value terms, PhilPaSSplus transactions as of end-September totaled P128.3 trillion, up by 5.4 percent from P121.7 trillion end-June.
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