The Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) has completed the migration of its credit-card operations from the old reliable magnetic strip technology to the chip-enabled cards under the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) emblem, as mandated by the monetary authorities.
The longest-running bank in the Philippines has finished upgrading 1.3 million credit cards. Jenelyn Z. Lacerna, vice president for credit cards business division, said at the bank’s 5th Travel Madness Expo in Manila.
According to Lacerna, a majority of BPI card users are jobholders with average age of 25 to 45, most of whom love to travel.
“Most of our customers are really our depositors, so they’re moneyed individuals and rather affluent. They already have savings. There’s a lot of them in the segment who actually travel,” she said.
Lacerna also said the bank plans to add 150,000 new card users this year and that, thus far, they are on target and will possibly even surpass their projected customer-growth goal this year.
“The economy of the Philippines is getting better” such that more and more Filipinos are getting affluent.
“I guess our acquisitions come mostly from our depositors and that is, perhaps, why our affluent base, our middle-income to affluent, is expanding,” Lacerna said.
Latest estimates place the number of credit-card holders in the Philippines at some 7 million, with 18.57 percent enrolled under BPI.
Last year the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) mandated all banks to upgrade their automated teller machines (ATMs) and make them compatible with EMV chip-enabled cards.
The chip-enabled cards are the new global standard for chip-based credit and debit transactions and considered more secure than the magnetic strip technology used in most bank-issued cards in the country.
Regulations mandate the use of the new standard of card transactions by January 2017.