PayMaya announced on Friday that it had joined the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) national QR code standard—the first mobile wallet to do so.
PayMaya said that it had officially adopted QR Ph, which aims to streamline the industry’s fragment QR-payments services into a single interoperable platform.
According to the BSP, this will remove the need for customers and merchants to maintain multiple e-wallet accounts.
PayMaya joins five other pilot participants in QR Ph. These are Land Bank of the Philippines, Asia United Bank, China Banking Corp., Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., and Union Bank of the Philippines.
“This is yet another milestone initiative that will help accelerate the adoption of digital payments across the country,” Orlando B. Vea, founder and CEO of PayMaya, said.
PayMaya said it could receive money transfers from other pilot participants via the QR Ph code generated within the PayMaya app, represented by the QRPh logo in the middle of the code bearing the national colors of the Philippines.
To receive money from other banks and financial institutions, a PayMaya account holder can go to the settings section of the app and click on the QR code icon to reveal their unique QR Ph-compliant code.
The sender can then scan this code via their participating bank’s mobile app to initiate the fund transfer.
“With QR Ph launched and for full implementation by June 2020, more Filipinos as well as micro and small enterprises are expected to be onboard the formal financial system as they are now able to easily do inter-operable electronic fund transfers and digital payments,” PayMaya said.
PayMaya is the digital financial services arm of Voyager Innovations, whose shareholders include PLDT Inc., China’s Tencent Holdings, global fund KKR and the World Bank’s IFC.—MIGUEL R. CAMUS