InstaPay money transfers swell to P5 trillion

MANILA, Philippines — Real-time fund transfers via InstaPay jumped by 45 percent to P5 trillion last year as volume surged by 56 percent to 838.56 million, BancNet said.

Despite the hefty volume, the robust InstaPay system, using world-class, cutting-edge technology, maintained a 99.89 percent controllable service availability rate during the year.

For December alone, InstaPay transactions reached a record of over 97 million.

BancNet CEO Elmarie Reyes said the record-breaking volume set a new milestone for the service as it grew by 13 million, or nearly 16 percent, from the previous month, and it was 41 million, or almost 73 percent, more than the volume in December 2022.

An all-time high single-day volume of 4.1 million money transfers was recorded on Dec. 15, the payday before Christmas, beating by 2.9 million transactions, or 241.6 percent, the record of 1.2 million set on the same day in 2022.

BancNet operates InstaPay, an electronic fund transfer system that allows consumers and businesses to transfer small amounts of money between sender and receiver accounts in different banks and e-wallets instantly.

It is accessible anytime through the mobile apps or websites of partner banks and e-wallets.

The maximum amount that can be transferred is P50,000.00 per transaction. InstaPay was introduced by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in 2018 as a priority payment system under the National Retail Payment System (NRPS) with BancNet as its clearing switch operator.

Four years later, the BSP designated InstaPay as a Prominently Important Payment System (PIPS), and authorized BancNet as an operator of a designated payment system (ODPS) which is InstaPay. A PIPS is placed under closer supervision and monitoring by the BSP to protect the public.

Over the last five years since its launch, InstaPay has accumulated more than 2.1 billion transactions worth P12.4 trillion, representing a compounded growth rate of 92 percent and 83 percent, respectively.

“We expect InstaPay to continue its upward growth trajectory this year as at least one new use case will be launched, and more participants will offer the existing use cases. New participants will also be onboarded this year, bringing in more end-users of InstaPay,” Reyes said.

Last December, over 19 million unique customers sent money through InstaPay.

As of end-2023, there were 86 InstaPay participants consisting of 65 banks and 21 e-wallet providers serving as either sender or receiver, or both.