FINANCIAL INCLUSION. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands on Thursday (May 23, 2024) holds a press briefing at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Office in Manila. Queen Máxima is also the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. (Photo by Leah Gonzales)
MANILA – Queen Máxima of the Netherlands in her capacity as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UNSGSA) said her visit to the Philippines aims to increase financial inclusion in the country.
In a briefing at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) office in Manila on Thursday, Queen Máxima said that while there were already efforts to increase financial inclusion from 17 percent in 2015, a lot more needs to be done to further improve financial inclusion.
"I was here in 2015 and financial inclusion back then was 17 percent, probably very low. So my visit actually resulted in a lot of work by the predecessors of [BSP Governor Eli] Remolona [Jr.] and also from government officials to actually change the regulatory environment to make a lot of things possible," Queen Máxima said.
Based on the BSP's financial inclusion survey in 2021, 56 percent of adults in the country had a bank account, a significant increase from just 23 percent in 2017.
The BSP's goal is to increase this to 70 percent in 2024.
Queen Máxima said there is also a need to increase access to credit and insurance.
"A lot of MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises).and high- or small-sized enterprises do not have the access to the credit they need to actually make their investments. There's also very little access to insurance. There's also very little access to real saving mechanisms," she said.
Queen Máxima said the government and the private sector should cooperate, and make investments to improve connectivity and make sure that financial services will reach all the population.
Remolona, for his part, said the discussion with the Queen mostly revolved around the payment system, and how to digitalize it more completely so it serves the masses in the Philippines.
"And then we talked about something called open finance. And that might be something that's new to many of us, but it's a very promising way to get more and more people involved in the financial system for purposes of not just financial inclusion but also financial health," he said.
Open finance is a concept that involves the sharing of customer-authorized data among financial institutions and third-party providers. It aims to foster innovative financial solutions.
Remolona said the BSP is encouraging open finance by designing an application programming interface (API).
"So we’re starting with PERA [Personal Equity and Retirement Account] for example. The pension scheme, we’re going to create an API for that and ask all the banks, all agreed to do this, to connect to PERA so that account holders in the bank can do their pensions through PERA," Remolona said.
"Besides PERA, we’re thinking of APIs for insurance — life insurance, property insurance, accident insurance," he added. (PNA)
