Remittances by overseas Filipino workers helped boost the financial transactions hosted by the Philippine Payments and Settlements System (PhilPaSS), the central bank’s real-time online money transfer facility.
Year-on-year, first half PhilPaSS transactions surged P52.11 trillion or 54.4 percent to P147.81 trillion from P95.7 trillion, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas said Monday, citing latest available data.
The volume of transactions soared 36.7 percent to 547,130 from 400,220 in the same comparable period.
The Bangko Sentral cited the following transactions as mainly responsible for the large volume of PhilPaSS transactions:
OFW remittances
Interbank lending and payments
Intraday Liquidity Facility availments and repayments
Sales and purchases of government securities via Delivery versus Payment (DvP)
e-DvP transactions
Cash withdrawal from banks.
And reverse repurchase and special depository accounts of the BSP. The central bank also cited sales and purchases of government debt papers, loan transactions, revenue collections of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs thru Electronic Fund Transfer Instruction System which helped increase the value and volume transactions handled by PhilPaSS.
The settlement of OFW remittances through the PhilPaSS Remit System would help save between P100 and P500 per transaction as current system charges, the BSP earlier said.
Along those lines, OFW families are expected to save from P92 million to P922 million with the real time and low cost delivery of remittances to the beneficiaries considering that each transaction has a fixed fee of only P50.
PhilPaSS transactions grew by 9.6 percent to P206.6 trillion in 2010 from P188.5 trillion in 2009. — VS
