The evolution of real-time payments in the Philippines

BancNet has over 30 years of payments experience in the Philippines. Initially providing ATM services, they subsequently developed the Interbank Fund Transfer (IBFT) service in the Philippines in 2000. In 2018 they entered into an agreement with Vocalink (a Mastercard company) to provide an RTP-managed service based on the Immediate Payments Service (IPS) technology which powers RTP systems in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Peru, Singapore, Thailand, the U.S. and is soon to be introduced in Canada.

The paper finds broad alignment with the key learnings from the application of the Fast Payment Framework identified by the World Bank Group (World Bank, 2021), but offers additional practical considerations from the operator’s perspective.