IMF Tasks Philippines’ Apex Bank on Information Management

The International Monetary Fund has advised the Philippines’ central bank (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) to look into procuring information on the flow of digital assets across borders.

The IMF communicated the suggestion to the institution through its technical report that was released on the 30th of December 2019 and is based on information from the Fund’s Monetary and Financial Statistics Mission in the nation earlier in 2019.

The Mission’s Suggestions
In the document, the IMF’s mission to the Philippines gave a lecture on how to treat digital assets in macroeconomic statistics at the BSP sometime last year. The mission asserted that the Philippines is becoming a valuable market for digital assets, citing the BSP’s recent authorization of more Virtual currency exchanges.

In mid-2019, BitMEX took a huge investment in the Philippine Digital Asset Exchange. The following month, the BSP approved two more cryptocurrency exchanges to transform the country’s native currency, Pesos, into a virtual form.

Considering this increasing factor, the IMF mission urged the BSP to begin reviewing ways of obtaining information from the exchanges and use the information for its macroeconomic examination, especially in respect to the international flow of finance through the use of digital assets.

The mission also recommended that the BSP collects aggregate information on the total transactions carried out by the exchanges, quarterly.

The mission recommends that the information covers both the source of the funds being transferred and its target address. They went on to state that it would be most helpful if the information was dissected even further to disclose the players carrying out the transactions.

BSP Will Not Tolerate Miscreants
The BSP has ordered local cryptocurrency exchanges, since 2017, to enroll as remittance and transfer firms and follow certain precautionary measures such as disallowing money laundering practices as well as terrorism funding, customer security, and many more.

Furthermore, the Governor of the BSP has cautioned the public against using cryptocurrencies to finance terrorism, stating that the institution is monitoring activities in the nation and that every bad actor will be brought to book.