Dennis Gaviola

Article (news)

Salve Ibaňez

ABS-CBN News

BSP Circular 1238 — Governor Eli Remolona&#x27;s answer to years of Filipinos wincing every time they moved their own money — took effect July 4.The mechanics are almost boring: Fees for sending money between banks or e-wallets can&#x27;t be &quot;materially different&quot; from fees within the same institution, save for a switching cost the BSP pegs at roughly P1.50. (It used to be much higher at P7, if I recall correctly).Translation: if your intrabank transfer is free, your InstaPay transfer should be close to free too. By the way, the circular never said zero.Still, the universal banks folded fast, and gracefully.BPI zeroed out transfers on July 1. RCBC followed on July 4. Landbank on July 7, PNB by July 10, with BDO and UnionBank in the same column.Is it generosity? Probably more of arithmetic. Banks pull the bulk of their revenue from loans and deposits.Waiving it costs them more than a shrug, I am sure, but you have to remember, transfers are not banks’ main line of business.E-wallets, on the other hand, don&#x27;t get to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. GCash trimmed its InstaPay fee to P10 from P15; Maya did the same, days later.Let me spell out why it’s harder for wallets to lower fees than banks: Fee income isn&#x27;t the side dish, it&#x27;s the entrée — north of 90 percent of revenue by some estimates, propping up agent networks in barangays no bank branch has yet reached.Squeeze that margin to zero and you&#x27;re not trimming fat, you&#x27;re cutting into the muscle.Whether the BSP&#x27;s cost-based pricing test accounts for that is the argument playing out in every fintech war room this week.No one has talked about how this will affect the planned GCash and Maya IPOs.For the record: My hat&#x27;s off to the BSP. It’s built a decade-long runway — the BSP&#x27;s retail payment modernization push dates back to December 2015 — and appears entirely unbothered by being the least popular man in half of Manila&#x27;s finance group chats right now.What the regulator seems to want isn&#x27;t really just a viral consumer win; it&#x27;s a sector that builds real savings products, reaches the credit-underserved, sells insurance responsibly, and packages investing into pieces small enough that first-timers won&#x27;t get hurt.Eleven years is a long lead time to still be treating &quot;easy money&quot; as the whole business model.If I were writing the industry&#x27;s playbook, I&#x27;d stop mourning the fee and start building for the segments still locked out. If fintechs can do that, I will be first in line for the IPOs.I did not expect the decision to be easy at the Monetary Board, and I heard that the voting wasn’t unanimous. Industry-side, I also did not expect everyone to take this lying down.One executive, notably, has suddenly become impossible to miss in industry group chats — vocal, visible, unmistakably unhappy with the circular.Enough so that others in the very same predicament have started quietly rolling their eyes at the tone, not the substance.&quot;Why do they sound like they own everybody, including us and the regulator?” one told me.<div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/business/2026/7/8/boardroom-tea-foxconn-and-the-philippines-ai-ambitions-2200">Boardroom Tea: Foxconn and the Philippines&#x27; AI ambitions</a></div><div> </div><div>GOLDEN NODE: FOXCONN, NEW CLARK CITY, AND THE POWER PROBLEM</div>If things happen as hoped, the Philippines may finally have the FDI headline it&#x27;s been chasing.The Pax Silica Initiative — Washington&#x27;s push to build semiconductor and AI-infrastructure supply chains outside the usual concentration points — added the Philippines as its 13th member this past April.The prize: A roughly 1,600-hectare &quot;Economic Security Zone&quot; carved out of New Clark City, pitched as an AI-native industrial hub.No framework agreement is signed yet. Finance Secretary Frederick Go&#x27;s team is hoping for a signing by fall, possibly timed to the ASEAN Summit in Manila this November.The man tasked with actually making New Clark City ready for that kind of tenant is BCDA President and CEO Jake Bingcang — homegrown talent in the truest sense. He joined BCDA in 1996 as an engineer with a project development officer hat, worked his way through the agency&#x27;s development and project-management posts for nearly three decades, ran point on New Clark City&#x27;s build-out as senior vice president starting 2019, and was named BCDA&#x27;s president and CEO by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in June 2023 — three years into the job now, and clearly the one holding the institutional memory for this deal.True to form, Bingcang stayed measured on Foxconn specifically — talks are ongoing, he noted, nothing signed — leaving Go to be the one who put the name on the record.Fair enough. We needed the good news more than we needed the caution.Can New Clark City power a data center campus at the scale Foxconn would need? BCDA&#x27;s answer so far: A 500-megawatt solar-plus-storage project with Acwa Power on a 500-hectare lease, a Korean firm (KEPCO) brought in to build out the smart grid, and — tellingly — a US-backed feasibility study for an LNG terminal and power plant designed for at least 1,200 megawatts.Bingcang&#x27;s own framing says it plainly: It&#x27;ll have to be a mix of LNG and solar, because solar alone can&#x27;t carry data-center-grade baseload.Interesting times.<div>Boardroom Tea comes out Wednesdays. Email salveibanez4@gmail.com.</div>

The mechanics are almost boring: Fees for sending money between banks or e-wallets can't be "materially different" from fees within the same institution, save for a switching cost the BSP pegs at roughly P1.50.

The mechanics are almost boring: Fees for sending money between banks or e-wallets can't be "materially different" from fees within the same institution, save for a switching cost the BSP pegs at roughly P1.50.

Boardroom Tea: What is actually happening as Instapay, PESONet fees drop to zero

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Boardroom Tea: What is actually happening as Instapay, PESONet fees drop to zero

Salve Ibaňez,

ABS-CBN News

Published July 15, 2026 10:32 PM PHT

Read More:

Boardroom Tea

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas

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