Real-time payment transactions in the Philippines grew 24 percent year-on-year in 2023, with transaction volume reaching 777 million and expected to reach 1.54 billion by 2028, according to the 2024 Prime Time for Real Time Report published by ACI Worldwide, a leader in real-time payments, in partnership with GlobalData.
Real-time payments pertain to the immediate transfer of funds 24/7 within a matter of seconds to the recipient’s account.
The real-time payments’ share of all digital payments in the country is projected to grow to 58.7 percent by 2028, while its transaction value is expected to reach $209.6 billion in the same year.
The report says that as of 2023, real-time payments accounted for 47.2 percent of all Philippine digital payments, with a transaction value of $89.5 billion.
InstaPay was introduced in 2018 as the first real-time payment system in the Philippines. This served as one of the critical rails for the national government’s thrust to digitize payments through the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap.
“Real-time payments hold the potential to facilitate greater economic growth and financial inclusion in the Philippines by eliminating payment friction and injecting greater liquidity in the financial system. As Filipinos continue to embrace digitization, we encourage the local banks and financial institutions to harness technological innovations that will enable them to fully leverage the capabilities of real-time transactions,” said Leslie Choo, senior vice president and managing director for APAC at ACI Worldwide.