FINANCIAL INCLUSION RISING

BSP said digital payments surged since the start of the pandemic last year

MANILA – The government’s bid for financial inclusion and digital payments partly gets a lift through collaborative efforts with the private sector, an executive of GCash said.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said digital payments surged since the start of the pandemic last year because of movement restrictions and since then financial institutions, mobile wallet service providers and financial technology (fintech) firms have launched products that allow people to easily do financial transactions using their mobile phones.

In a virtual briefing Wednesday, GCash President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Martha Sazon said “one company alone cannot solve the problem of accessibility.”

She said GCash’s input in the government’s financial inclusion program is on the inclusion part, as it does not partner with one company alone but several entities to further serve the public.

“We don’t compete. We don’t seek to compete with the banks. Rather, we want to enable them, in fact, to reach the customers that they didn’t reach before, they couldn’t reach before,” she said.

She said they have teamed up with the BSP and several banks “because what we want is to partner so that together we can reach that inclusivity, that it would be more reachable for everyone.”

“We also believe that with their wealth of experience and our digital savviness and our creativity combined we can do more, we can be more bold in doing things,” she said.

She likened the shift to digital financial transactions to how Filipinos adopted the internet, wherein most Filipinos were introduced to this using their mobile phones and not the personal computers because of the availability of this service using mobile data.

“So straight from unbanked to a mobile-based banking or mobile-based financial transactions. So that’s what we want to do,” she added. /

We don’t compete. We don’t seek to compete with the banks. Rather, we want to enable them, in fact, to reach the customers that they didn’t reach before, they couldn’t reach before.

MARTHA SAZON GCash President and CEO