MANILA - The share of digital payments to total retail payments volume in the Philippines rose to 30.3 percent in 2021 from 20.1 percent in 2020, according to the latest e-payments data of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). The value of digital payments in the country, meanwhile, represented 44.1 percent of total retail payments in 2021, up from the 26.8 percent recorded a year earlier. "The latest results show we are closer to meeting our objective of converting at least 50 percent of retail payment transactions to digital form by the end of 2023, under the BSP Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap," BSP Governor Felipe Medalla said in a statement Wednesday. The key contributors to the overall growth of digital payments were merchant payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) remittances, and business payments of salaries and wages to employees, all of which are high-frequency, low value retail transactions. The volume of merchant payments increased by 43.8 percent, while P2P remitt
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III (File photo) MANILA - The Philippines has withdrawn from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) on the back of questionable metrics and procedures for assessing the compliance of implementing-countries with the international organization's transparency requirements. In a June 20, 2022 letter addressed to EITI chairman and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III called EITI's Validation -a quality assurance assessment process- "subjective, biased and unfair." "We find that the manner by which the EITI Board undertakes its validation is unduly subjective, biased and unfair. The Philippines has no confidence in the ability of the EITI to undertake an impartial, transparent, and evidence-based validation process," Dominguez said. The Department of Finance (DOF) chairs the Philippine Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (PH-EITI), a multi-stakeholder bo
(PNA file photo) MANILA-The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) on Monday thanked the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for heeding the call of President Rodrigo Duterte to stop e-sabong operations in the country by immediately ordering its bank-supervised financial institutions (BSFIs) to remove all e-sabong operators from the list of merchants in their respective online applications. At the same time, DILG Secretary Eduardo Ano called on Facebook (FB) to block several FB pages or accounts catering to illegal e-sabong operations, including those in its social media affiliates or subsidiaries. "Malaking bagay ang ginawang direktiba ng BSP na ipatanggal ang e-sabong sa listahan ng mga maaaring bayaran sa e-wallets tulad ng G-Cash at PayMaya. Salamat, BSP, sa mabilis na aksyon at pagtugon sa utos ng Pangulo (The BSP's directive to remove e-sabong from the list of payables in e-wallets such as G-Cash and PayMaya is paramount. Thank you, BSP, for the swift actio
Senator Christopher "Bong" Go (File photo) MANILA - Senator Christopher "Bong" Go emphasized the need to continue the government's fight against illegal drugs, citing the gains of the Duterte administration so far to tackle the problem. Go said if the fight against illegal drugs continues, other issues such as criminality and corruption may also be addressed. "Kapag nako-contain mo 'yung illegal drugs, kasama na diyan 'yung criminality at 'yung korapsyon. 'Pag lumala 'yung drugs, babalik 'yung criminality, babalik 'yung korapsyon kasi makokorap na po 'yung tao (If illegal drugs are contained, criminality and corruption will also be addressed. If illegal drugs worsen, criminality and corruption will resurrect because people have corrupted mind)," Go said in an ambush interview after his monitoring visit of the Malasakit Center and turnover of check to the Davao del Sur Provincial Hospital in Digos City on May 28. Go also
(File photo) MANILA - The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) slammed the group Kontra Daya for its "overactive imagination and conspiracy theories" about alleged widespread fraud and failure of elections in the just-concluded national and local elections. DILG spokesperson Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya said in a news release on Sunday that the self-styled watchdog should instead focus on writing crime or political thrillers. "Kontra Daya's report on the 2022 election belong in the fiction section of major bookstores or libraries for being the product of a wild imagination," he said. He called Kontra Daya's claim of alleged "failure of the automation election system to guard the sanctity of the ballot" as downright irresponsible since it has no basis whatsoever. He explained that the source code, the human-readable copy of the software running the Automated Election System (AES) of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), was subj