Businesses trail consumers in digital payments adoption

MANILA, Philippines — The widening gap between consumer and business use of digital payments is putting pressure on corporate finance teams, which often still rely on fragmented and manual processes to reconcile electronic transactions, according to payment solutions provider SwiftPay.

Data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) showed that 74.91 percent of payments initiated by individuals were digital by volume in 2025, compared with only 18.75 percent of payments made by businesses.

The share of digital payments made by individuals rose from 72.2 percent, while the corresponding share for businesses declined from 19.8 percent.

This brought the gap between consumer and business payment digitalization to 56.2 percentage points, wider than the 52.4-point difference in 2024.

The disparity emerged even as the country continued to make headway in its shift toward cashless transactions. Digital channels accounted for 64.69 percent of retail payment volume in 2025, up from 57.45 percent a year earlier.

However, the share of digital payments by value declined to 53.32 percent from about 59 percent in 2024, indicating that the increase in adoption was largely driven by more frequent, lower-value transactions.

SwiftPay said the growing ease of accepting digital payments does not necessarily mean that the internal processes used by companies to account for these transactions have kept pace.

Businesses may receive payments through QR Ph, electronic wallets, cards, bank transfers and over-the-counter channels. Finance teams, however, may still need to consolidate information from different providers, settlement schedules, reports and accounting systems before the funds are properly recorded.

SwiftPay’s Beyond Payment Acceptance insights report described this as the “reconciliation gap,” or “the distance between a payment being confirmed and the cash becoming properly recorded, visible, and actionable within an enterprise’s core systems.”

The company said manual reconciliation could raise labor costs, delay the visibility and use of available cash and increase the risk of unmatched transactions, disputes and accounting errors as payment volumes grow.

Developments in fraud monitoring, consumer redress, transaction traceability and the adoption of the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard are also increasing the need for accurate and accessible transaction data across payment systems.

“The question is no longer simply whether businesses can accept digital payments. It is whether their operations can keep up with what happens next,” SwiftPay said.