LENDER AllBank Inc. said it is joining the move to a cash-light environment through the use of QR (quick response) code to transfer money between individuals and merchants.
The rapid shift to digital payments due to lockdowns provided a momentum for AllBank to modernize its payment mechanisms, the lender said.
The digital payment system has a huge potential and is seen to benefit merchants, such as All Day supermarket, the grocery store chain of the Villar group, it added in a statement.
“This Covid-19 pandemic has caught all of us by surprise and very much accelerated the pace of digital transformation in our country. Most, if not all, companies have had to cope with the pandemic by changing the way they do things – from our normal manual or face-to-face transactions to digital ones,” All Day Director Manuel Paolo A. Villar said in his message during the launch of the national QR code.
The said event was led by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Philippine Payments Management Inc. and Bancnet last week.
“These all happened in 2020 and are still continuing in 2021. The use of e-wallets and other payment platforms have become widely-used,” Villar said.
“For merchants like All Day Supermarket, this is a welcome development as we will be able to ensure that our customers have a safe, secure, reliable and efficient channel to make their payments,” he added.
The BSP is pilot-testing the P2M payment schemes as part of its “Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap 2020-2023” to pave the way for financial inclusion and digitalization of payments. Full implementation of the P2M (person-to-merchant) scheme is slated in the third quarter, the central bank said.
Villar said he was glad the regulator took the initiative to adopt a national QR code—called QR Ph—as this would encourage more people to shift to more secure, simple and seamless electronic transactions on the back of a surge of instant payments last year by more than 5,000 percent.
AllBank, formerly known as Optimum Development Bank, is the first thrift bank allowed to participate in the BSP’s pilot P2M program.
A QR code is a two-dimensional image-based bar code capable of holding large amounts of information. QR codes store information using patterns of black dots and white spaces, arranged in a square grid.
The central bank in 2019 has launched a QR code standard (QR Ph) to be followed by banks and other electronic money issuers. The QR Ph can be used for digital person-to-person or P2M transfers of money.