The country’s leading digital financial services company, PayMaya, expects the Philippines to rank even higher next year in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report, as more government agencies adopt digital transactions.
This came following the announcement of the 29-notch jump in the country’s ranking in World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report, which ranked the country 95th among 190 economies covered in terms of ease of doing business.
PayMaya founder and CEO Orlando B. Vea said digital payments form a critical component in making it simpler for interested parties and individuals to set up a business in the country.
“Payments complete the cycle for setting up or doing business in the country, especially when applying for permits or remitting taxes, which is why having digital payments acceptance in the online portals of government agencies plays an important role in simplifying and improving government processes for doing business in the country,” Vea said.
PayMaya is the only financial technology company in the Philippines offering integrated consumer and merchant payment solutions. It is the first to give millions of Filipinos an e-wallet that allows cashless transactions at any time of the day, anywhere in the world, and from any device.
PayMaya recently partnered with eight government agencies to allow them to accept digital payments such as credit, debit, and prepaid card payments online and within their offices. These include payments using the mobile wallet app of PayMaya.
These agencies are the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), the Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-Ibig), the Professional Regulations Commission (PRC), the National Home Mortgage Finance Corporation (NHMFC), the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), the Social Security System (SSS) and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
In the meantime, certain local government units such as the city of Manila and the province of Isabela are enabled with cashless disbursements for their citizen beneficiaries, PayMaya said.
With an encouraging regulatory regime supervised by the Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA) and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), Vea said it was not entirely impossible for the Philippines to leapfrog its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia once the World Bank released its new report by next year.
“We are encouraged by the progressiveness of the government agencies we have partnered with and are currently talking to, because many of them are now open to improving their processes with the help of digital payments in order to deliver better public service to the Filipino people,” he said.