Remittances reach $23B as of end-Oct., up 4.2% on-year

The central bank said cash remittances or transfers captured by banking networks reached $23 billion in the first 10 months of the year, up 4.2 percent year-on-year.

For the month of October only, cash remittances grew by 8.4 percent to $2.275 billion compared to the previous year’s $2.099 billion.

Personal remittances or the “sum of net compensation” of overseas Filipinos, in the meantime, amounted to $25.72 billion as of end-October, higher by 5.2 percent compared to same time last year.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Nestor A. Espenilla Jr. in a statement said that the increase in bank channeled remittances was “boosted by the increase in remittances from landbased workers and sea-based workers, which both grew by 4.2 percent compared to the level posted a year ago.”

The BSP expects remittances to increase by four percent in 2017, or about $28 billion at the close of the year.

Personal remittances for the month of October rose by 9.7 percent year-on-year to $2.552 billion.

According to Espenilla, personal remittances from land-based overseas Filipinos with work contracts of one year or more including other household-to-household transfers registered a 4.2 percent increase to $19.8 billion during the 10-month period.

Remittances from sea-based and land-based workers with work contracts of less than one year went up by 4.1 percent to $5.3 billion as of end-October.

The BSP noted that the top countries of source for the cash remittances were the United Arab Emirates and the US. Other major sources were Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Japan, United Kingdom, Qatar, Kuwait, Germany, and Hong Kong.

These countries accounted for about 80.2 percent of total cash remittances during the January-October tally, said the BSP.