BIZ BUZZ: Protecting Filipinos’ trust in payments systems
Following the recent incident involving unauthorized GCash transfers, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) wants the public to know that they can still trust the country’s digital payments system.
That was the assurance from BSP Deputy Governor Mamerto Tangonan, who told reporters on the sidelines of a “systemic risk dialogue” hosted by the central bank and the International Monetary Fund that the regulator is conducting a “thorough” probe into the GCash incident to keep public trust intact.
Tangonan, head of the BSP’s payments and currency management sector, said he expects the investigation to wrap up not later than mid-December.
The public will know the results of the probe which, he explained, may show if there are policy gaps that the regulator must plug. Recall that GCash had said the unauthorized deductions on account balances of affected users were due to “errors in an ongoing system reconciliation process.”
“To instill that trust, we have to tell the public what happened, what we’re going to do about it and how do they protect themselves,” Tangonan said.
He added that the BSP will exert every effort to get at the root cause of the unfortunate incident “because that’s very important.”
As it is, the BSP is leaving no stone unturned in protecting the hard-won trust of Filipinos in the country’s payments system, even if it means tighter regulations for e-wallets and intensified enforcement of policies.
“That (more regulations) would be, I would say, the last measure to do because sometimes you have good regulations in place but then [it] just needs to be monitored and enforced,” Tangonan said.
