Banking & Finance

The Philippine government is doubling its efforts to improve anti-money laundering and terrorist financing regulations for the purpose of getting the country removed from the watchlist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global dirty money watchdog.

The number of low-income Filipinos who own bank or financial accounts has almost doubled in recent years due, in large part, to the continued digitalization of financial services, according to the central bank.

At least half of the total retail transactions will be online as early as next year or one year ahead of the 2023 target of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) as the regulator continues to ramp up efforts to transform the Philippines to a cash-lite from a cash-heavy economy.

Bank lending worsened its slump in April to post its worst contraction in over two decades, a grim reminder of the limits of the central bank’s powers in supporting the country’s pandemic-hit economy.

The Department of Finance (DOF) bucked assertions that the Philippines will be the “laggard in Asia” in a post-pandemic world.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Benjamin E. Diokno has reiterated that the central bank will keep monetary policy accommodative in support of the country’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. 

The Philippine peso has ranked first among four Asian currencies that maintained their value against the US dollar in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preliminary figures released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that the country’s total trade contracted 38.7% and the trade deficit shrank 48.9% in May 2020

Year-on-year headline inflation eased to 2.1 percent in May from 2.2 percent in the previous month and was within the BSP’s expected range of 1.9-2.7 percent for the month. The resulting year-to-date average inflation rate of 2.5 percent was within the Government’s target range of 3.0 percent ± 1.0 percentage point for the year. Meanwhile, core inflation—which excludes selected volatile food and energy items to measure underlying price …

The BSP releases the Enhanced Report on the Philippine Financial System for the Second Semester of 2019.[1] The Report highlights the capability of the Philippine financial system, with banking system at the core, to withstand external vulnerabilities such as the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Existing prudential reforms guided the BSP-supervised financial institutions (BSFIs) to maintain sufficient cushion in times of …