By Eileen A. Mencias

THE central bank has doubled the daily limit on electronic money transfers through cell phones to P100,000 in a bid to regulate the rapidly growing electronic money business.

The move was among the points in the regulatory framework that the central bank’s Monetary Board approved recently to protect consumers and promote innovations in fund transfer technologies, which have expanded from cash and stored-value cards to mobile phones and similar devices.

Bangko Sentral Deputy Governor Nestor Espenilla said the new policy framework would cover consumer protection, regulatory principles and prudential measures that e-money providers would have to follow.

The most common examples of e-money instruments are the cash debit cards offered by banks and the fund-transfer facilities of mobile phone companies like Smart and Globe Telecom, which allow users to buy things, pay bills or transfer funds via their cell phones or personal computers.

Jones Campos, a consultant of Globe, which offers G-Cash, said the new regulation meant no consumer could spend or transfer more than P100,000 in one day to comply with the anti-money laundering law.

The central bank stressed that e-money instruments were not deposits and were not covered by the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp., but regulators are considering measures to make e-money safer for consumers.

The new framework also requires non-bank institutions, such as telecommunication companies and possibly pawnshops and other establishments interested in issuing e-money instruments, to register with the central bank.

The central bank also requires such non-bank institutions to be stock corporations with a minimum paid-up capital of P100 million and engaged only in the business of e-money unless otherwise allowed.

Visa Philippines country manager Bob Joubert said the new framework was appropriate as the industry’ landscape could change as more people opted for safer payment schemes. Internet purchases, for example, were growing, he said.

Debit cards had overtaken credit cards in the volume of transactions around the world, he said, but the Philippine market still had more credit card purchases than debit cards, although that could change soon.

Espenilla said ad hoc policies were enough in the past because there were only a few operators providing the service, but “now the number is growing, so we need to provide this regulatory framework to anticipate potential problem areas.”