No PhilPaSSplus fees until end-2022 — BSP (Sabong News)
Author
Lee C. Chipongian
Date
APRIL 03 2022
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is extending the waiver of fees on fund transfers for users of its Philippine Payment and Settlement System Plus (PhilPaSSplus) until end December 2022.
PhilPaSSplus fees were temporarily cancelled since April 2020 as part of BSP’s time-bound relief measures to banks during the pandemic.
“The BSP enjoins the participants to extend the benefits of this relief measure to the financial consumers by ensuring that the fees for electronic payments services, such as InstaPay, PESONeI, and QRPh, are reasonable,” according to BSP Deputy Governor Mamerto E. Tangonan in a memo he issued last March 30.
Fund transfer transactions are made through the PhilPaSSplus which is a real time gross settlement system owned by the BSP for the processing and settlement of interbank high value payment transactions through the demand deposit accounts maintained with the BSP.
In waiving PhilPaSSplus fees, the BSP is hoping that its supervised entities can also improve financial intermediation services to the public.
The BSP suspended PhilPaSSplus fees on six types of transactions such as interbank, the peso-leg of US dollar trades and government securities trades, Philippine Clearing House Corp. (PCHC) transactions, automated teller machines or ATM transactions and the manual processing of interbank transactions.
Pre-pandemic, PhilPaSSplus fees for interbank transactions were already free for transaction of P100 or less.
For the peso-leg of US trades a P5 fee was charged up to P500,000 transaction value and P10 from P500,001 to P1 million. PCHC transactions before Covid-19 was charged P400 for transaction value of P40 million and above, while the peso-leg of government securities transactions and manual interbank transactions have ad valorem fees.
Last August 2021, the BSP implemented a live run of the PhilPaSSplus which is more secure and has a larger settlement capacity such as equity trades, on top of the current foreign exchange and bond trades.
The BSP migrated from PhilPaSS which was first established in 2002, to PhilPaSSplus in July 2020.
PhilPaSSplus has a double capacity for settlements of up to 20,000 per day from the previous 10,000 per day.
About 170 financial institutions – mostly banks — are currently using the PhilPaSSplus to settle their clients’ ATM, InstaPay, PESONet, and check transactions.
