E-Money in the Philippines: Types of E-Money

There are basically two types of electronic money in the Philippines, each one with its own set of arrangements.

1. Prepaid cards, also called stored value cards, have been issued by banks for some time now as one of their electronic banking products. The cards are loaded with electronic value upon exchange of an equivalent value of bills and coins. You can either load the value over the counter (i.e., the bank tellers), or have the value transferred from a deposit account.

2. Electronic wallets, in contrast to prepaid cards, are usually "inside" a cellular phone, or specifically the SIM. In the same way, value can be loaded via over the counter transactions or a transfer from one e-wallet to another (also called P2P or phone-to-phone transfers). E-wallets are usually issued by a non-bank company, or by a bank in partnership with a non-bank company, like a telecommunications company.

In both cases, the record of the value is actually stored not in the card or the SIM, but in a database managed by the issuer. This is because of the requirement of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (the central bank of the Philippines), for issuers to have a system that can track balances and usage of each of the e-money holders that subscribe to them.

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Related Topics:

What is E-Money?
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