Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Benjamin Diokno reported on Wednesday that more Filipinos are using Quick Response (QR) codes for person-to-person transactions.
In a recent speaking engagement, Diokno said QR PH person-to-person (P2P) payments increased by 22 percent in terms of volume in February this year, compared to its level in the previous month. By value, QR PH transactions increased by 26 percent.
The first use case of QR PH in the country is the QR PH P2P facility, which was launched in November 2019, to enable digital fund transfers between peers or individual end-users.
As of end-March 2021, there are 20 InstaPay participants that offer QR PH P2P payment services to their clients.
Last month, the BSP and the payment services industry expanded on this and launched the QR PH Person-to-Merchant, or QR PH P2M. This is a digital payment stream, which is expected to bring benefits to both consumers and businesses.
“QR PH is among the identified payment use cases under the digital payments streams, one of the pillars of the Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap or DPTR,” Diokno said.
“With digital finance infrastructures and digital governance and standards as its two other pillars, this road map is expected to build an environment that is conducive to the digital transformation of the country’s payments system,” he added.
Diokno said the growth in QR code usage is parallel to the strong digital growth in the banking industry as brought about by the pandemic.
“Although the pandemic has seriously affected the country’s economy, we were able to fast-track our digital transformation… We have been able to move forward because we chose to innovate and embrace digitalization,” Diokno said.
The BSP has earlier reported that combined transactions by electronic fund transfer facilities PESONet and InstaPay grew by 348 percent in volume and 170 percent in value in February 2021 respectively, compared to figures recorded during the same month in 2020.