THE FINANCE department has asked the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to pave the way for the shift to a digital banking system for the Overseas Filipino Bank (OFB).

“We asked Deputy Governor [Maria Almasara] Cyd N. Amador to better check all the regulations in the central bank, and everything that chokes this kind of business to take these out,” Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said in a statement yesterday, referring to financial regulations concerning electronic commerce.

Mr. Dominguez said he wants to put up a mobile payment technology system for overseas Filipinos who regularly remit money to the Philippines via the OFB.

“A bank can be operated without any branches. You just operate it through your smartphones. You can open an account for 10 million OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) without them having to go to a branch and opening one up,” said Mr. Dominguez.

“We have already have a good size of potential OFWs abroad and that’s already 10 million, LANDBANK has five million account holders, so why can’t we deal with them through smartphones?” he added.

This comes after Mr. Domingez led a delegation of government officials for a three-day workshop on digital solutions in Alibaba Business School in Hangzhou, China last month.

Mr. Dominguez said the Philippines could emulate the payment system of Alibaba’s financial technology affiliate, Ant Financial, that has over 200 million account holders with combined deposits of $250 billion and has zero physical branches.

“Among the takeaways we had as a group there was that the Philippines has the opportunity of leapfrogging a lot of (digital) applications because we are not too much computerized yet, unlike other countries that have hard investments in hardware which is fast becoming obsolete but they still hang on to them because they invested so much money in them,” said Mr. Dominguez.

OFB, a subsidiary of LANDBANK, was launched in January to provide financial products and services tailored to the requirement of overseas Filipinos such as efficient foreign remittance services.

However, the Finance chief noted supplemental measures to help boost the development of the digital economy in the country, such as the national ID system and a third telecommunications firm.

Digital innovations that have already begun in the country including the BSP’s National Retail Payment System (NRPS) launched in December 2015 to create a safe, efficient and reliable electronic retail payment system in the country.

In November last year, the central bank launched the PESO Net electronic fund transfer payment scheme for individuals and large businesses, which is the first automated clearing house under the NRPS. The BSP is also set to launch this year another automated clearing house called InstaPay, which will enable 24/7, low-value electronic fund transfers. — Elijah Joseph C. Tubayan

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