Philippines central bank drafts one-year freeze on new payment operators

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has circulated a draft rule that would stop accepting applications from new payment system operators for a full year.

The break is in order to give the regulator time to rebuild how it licenses and supervises the firms that move money through the country’s QR and mobile payment systems.

Why did Bangko Sentral ng pause its operations?

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has written a full-year freeze of its operations into a proposed circular titled “Regulations to Strengthen Integrity Controls in Payment Transactions,” which amends the Manual of Regulations for Payment Systems.

There has been growing concern inside the BSP that mobile and QR payments have expanded faster than banks and regulators can follow the money. Investigators also say that layered arrangements between intermediaries make it hard to name the actual seller behind a payment or to freeze a suspicious flow while it is happening.

If approved, for 12 months, the BSP would neither accept nor process new applications to run a payment system. Firms already waiting in line will have their files stay under review during the freeze. Companies would also be blocked from launching activities that need operator registration unless the central bank signs off separately.

Licensed virtual asset service providers are singled out in the draft as high-risk merchants alongside casinos, gambling and gaming operators that hold player funds, adult-oriented businesses, and money service outfits such as remittance and currency-exchange firms.

The rule would push banks and other supervised institutions to onboard regulated VASPs only through direct merchant arrangements, with no intermediary layer sitting in between, due to complaints from regulators that the complex chain of intermediaries hides the true recipient of payments.

These direct relationships will have stricter monitoring and limits on transaction size and payout schedules set against each merchant’s risk profile.

Will merchants in the Philippines be on a registry?

The draft also contains a proposal to create a National QR Code Merchant Database. This database will hold a record for every business that takes payment through the country’s standardized QR scheme. It would also mark whether a merchant is active, restricted, suspended, or terminated.

When one provider changes a merchant’s status, the others working with that same business would be alerted automatically and prompted to run their own checks.

The BSP is planning for a temporary secure registry to be operational within 90 days of the rule taking effect. A full database is expected to be running after 12 months, and every active merchant is expected to be recorded and validated within 15 months.

The draft also stated that institutions would have to flag material fraud, sanctions breaches, cyber or data incidents, and unlicensed merchant activity within 24 hours of finding them. They are also required to provide a fuller report afterwards.

This proposal comes after the Philippine SEC warned 10 exchanges in August 2025, including OKX, Bybit, KuCoin, and Kraken, for serving Filipino users without local authorization, and said it would coordinate with Google, Apple, and Meta to block their marketing and apps.

Cryptopolitan reported that the government launched Integrity Chain in September 2025, a blockchain records system for public-works contracts, after mass protests over flood-control corruption.

The circular will take effect 15 days after publication if finalized, during that time the BSP will be collecting feedback.

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