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The governor of the Central Bank of the Philippines, Benjamin Diokno, said that the bank will not launch its own digital currency, since most citizens of the state prefer to use cash.
In September, the Central Bank of the Philippines Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) began exploring the possibility of launching a digital Philippine peso to improve the quality of financial services. However, in a recent speech, BSP manager Benjamin Diokno said that the central bank does not plan to launch it in the near future. He explained that the vast majority of the country's residents prefer to use cash, and are heavily dependent on it. In addition, settlement systems in their current state allow for fairly efficient payments in the country, Diokno said.
According to BSP, 53% of Filipinos (about 58 million people) have an account in financial institutions. By the end of 2023, the regulator hopes to increase this figure to 70%. In 2020, only every fifth payment was made in digital format. By next year, the Central Bank of the Philippines intends to increase the number of digital payments to 50%, but it is not necessary to use the state cryptocurrency for this, Diokno said. Now the central bank is only studying various options for its use for international payments and settlements with securities.
The manager of the Economist Intelligence Unit, Swarup Gupta, believes that the deployment of a state-owned stablecoin in the Philippines will greatly depend on the success of the development of a digital identification system in the country. Now the central bank's doubts about the launch of the digital currency are quite understandable, since the Philippine economy is suffering from many problems that can make it difficult to launch the digital peso. Given that the Philippines' digital economy is underdeveloped, the launch of the central bank's digital currency may hinder the expansion of access to financial services, paradoxical as it may sound, Gupta said. He explained that by launching a digital peso, the central bank can displace commercial banks and other private players, since their services will no longer be necessary.
As for ordinary cryptocurrencies, the Central Bank of the Philippines considers them risky assets that allow bypassing the banking system. Last year, BSP announced the introduction of mandatory licensing of companies working with digital assets.
