Philippines BSP Freezes New Payment Operator Registrations, Impacting 314 Firms

The Philippines just hit pause. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas is planning a 12-month freeze on new payment-system operator registrations — a hard stop that’ll reshape who can enter the country’s increasingly crowded digital payments market.

The BSP’s draft circular frames the move as a “holistic review” of the entire regulatory environment, covering the operator services taxonomy and related licensing policies. It’s a sweeping audit of how the central bank classifies, registers, and oversees the layers of firms — merchant aggregators, intermediaries, settlement entities — that now make up the Philippine payments chain. The freeze, if finalized, kicks in 15 days after the circular gets published in the Official Gazette or a major newspaper. Unregistered firms can’t start new payment-system operations during that window. Companies with pending applications filed before the moratorium can still get a technical review, but final approval or denial gets pushed to after the 12 months are up.

314 operators. That’s the current count.

As of August 28, the BSP had 314 registered payment-system operators on its books, including those cleared for merchant acquisition. It’s a big number — and probably part of why the central bank wants to slow down and take stock. A market that’s grown that fast tends to develop gaps: unclear roles, overlapping responsibilities, compliance blind spots. The BSP seems to think it’s gotten to that point. The draft differentiates OPS registration from banking licenses, electronic-money licenses, and merchant-acquisition licenses, which matters a lot for determining who can legally do what inside a payment flow. That distinction is murky in practice, and the review is basically an attempt to clean it up.

Crypto-Linked Merchants in the Crosshairs

The draft doesn’t just hit the pause button on new entrants. It also takes direct aim at merchant-acquiring chains — specifically ones where BSP-supervised entities are processing payments for virtual asset businesses through intermediaries. That’s a pointed move. Crypto-linked merchants operating through layered intermediary structures have long been a compliance headache for regulators across Southeast Asia, and the Philippines is no different.

The proposal calls for enhanced due diligence, tighter monitoring, and transaction limits calibrated to risk profiles when those kinds of arrangements are in play. It pushes hard on merchant identification, KYC and KYB checks, AML controls, sanctions screening, and fraud detection. And it’s especially focused on situations involving pooled accounts — the kind of structure where tracing a specific transaction back to a specific entity gets genuinely difficult. That’s where responsibility tends to get diffused, and the BSP clearly wants to close that gap.

Basically, if you’re a payment operator running money through intermediaries for crypto merchants, the BSP is watching more closely now. The moratorium gives it time to build a framework that makes that scrutiny permanent.

Read also: BSP Imposes 12-Month Freeze on New Payment Operator Applications, Risking VASP Licenses

What Happens to Existing Operators

Existing operators keep running. The draft doesn’t shut down current registrants — they continue under the existing framework while the review plays out. That’s a deliberate choice. The BSP can’t afford to freeze the whole market cold; consumers and businesses still need payment services to function. So the pause is surgical: new entrants wait, current players operate, and the regulator gets 12 months to figure out whether the rules fit the market it’s actually supervising.

It’s not entirely clear yet what the final circular will look like. The draft is still in draft form — language can change, exceptions can appear, and the scope of the measures might shift before anything gets published officially. No timeline was given for when the final version drops.

The broader context here is worth noting. Digital payment adoption across Southeast Asia has accelerated sharply, and regulators throughout the region have struggled to keep pace with the speed of market development. The Philippines sits in that same bind. A market with 314 registered operators — some of them touching virtual asset businesses through multi-layer intermediary chains — is probably too complex to regulate well with frameworks built for a simpler era.

Compliance Burden Shifts to the Chain

One of the sharper edges in the draft is its emphasis on preventing diffusion of responsibility. In complex merchant-acquiring chains, it’s easy for each participant to assume someone else is handling compliance. The BSP wants to kill that assumption. Every entity in the payment flow — not just the top-level operator — needs to meet KYC, KYB, and AML standards. Sanctions screening and fraud detection can’t be treated as someone else’s job.

See also: Binance Seeks Payment License from Kazakhstans National Bank to Expand Crypto Hub

That’s a harder standard than what many intermediaries are probably used to. And it’s probably going to force some restructuring of how these chains are built, not just who’s allowed to join them.

The final framework, whenever it comes, will determine how much of that burden sticks — and who in the chain ends up carrying it. For now, the 314 operators already registered keep their spots. Everyone else waits.