MANILA -- The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is conducting its own independent investigation on what happened with e-wallet platform GCash over the weekend.

GCash said a "product issue" forced it to go through a "system reconciliation process" after customers reported unauthorized transactions over the weekend.

"We have a team there on-site, in GCash, and and we're doing an independent investigation, meaning this is independent for what we expect G cash to do," said BSP Deputy Governor Mamerto Tangonan. 

Tangonan said they will release the results of their probe to the public once it has been completed.

The official acknowledged that trust is one of the reasons why some Filipinos are not using digital payments.

"We do a quarterly consumer expectation survey, and we have these rider questions there in that survey, and a quick one of the questions there is, what's what's keeping you from using digital payments? And there are three that figure a lot," Tangonan said.

"First is the lack of identity documents, but that's declining because of the 57 million plastic IDs already out there, and pushing 90 million digital IDs out there. So that's declining. The second one is like the trust and awareness issue."

"The third one is affordability," he added. 

The Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT), meanwhile, is convinced that there was no external hacking in the incident which led to some users being affected by unauthorized transactions. 

No external hacking in GCash issue, says DICT

But DICT Secretary Ivan John Dy said the country still needs a cybersecurity regulator.

"Pwedeng ibigay yun sa ibang ahensya o pwede ring sa loob ng DICT, kasi, sa ngayon nga, yan ang problema natin, walang mandatory disclosure process kapagka ikaw ay nagkaroon ng computer error," he said.

DICT has no authority to audit fintech firms amid GCash 'system reconciliation'

--ANC, 14 November 2024