Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) aims
to further boost cashless shopping using BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay
Prepaid Mastercard. In 2018, over Php 50
billion in transaction volume from more than 2.5 million clients were
generated.
“This is part of our ongoing
digitalization journey, as we aim to provide our clients a safer environment
for transactions and to meet the global standard in security,” said Jenny
Lacerna, Head of Unsecured Lending and Cards.
“Compared to the old magnetic stripe card
which only rely on the cardholder’s signature and visual inspection, the EMV
chip protects our clients and sellers more, because it is much safer and more
convenient to use, especially for different cashless transactions. With this,
we expect more people to go cashless with their shopping as they get more
comfortable in using BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay Prepaid
Mastercard," she said.
The BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay
Prepaid Mastercard are EMV-enabled cards with more enhanced and more secured
features. EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, Visa. It is the global standard
for chip-based debit, prepaid and credit card transactions.
BPI switched to EMV cards to comply with
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) mandate to use EMV for card issuance, ATM,
and Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminals. Last year, BPI encouraged clients to use the
debit and prepaid card through its “Get Ready to Win” EMV promo, which ran from
October 27, 2018 to February 19 this year.
The bank raffled off prizes that included
a Volkswagen and half a million pesos to BPI clients who claimed, activated, or
used their BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay Prepaid Mastercard.
Mary Joy Watanabe took home the brand-new
Volkswagen Santana, while Kenji Josef Castillo won the Php 500,000 cash prize.
Watanabe said she was initially
incredulous when told that she won the grand prize until a representative from
BPI Davao personally confirmed the news.
“We have a baby who undergoes therapy
twice a week, so we are planning to use the car to drive her to the therapy
center since we live far from the city. This is really an answered prayer
because we were actually planning to buy a car but we were short. We needed to
save more,” she said during the awarding and turn-over of the car at Volkswagen
BGC.
Castillo, for his part, still doesn’t know
what to do with his half a million: “I got a few ideas. First thing, I told my
wife when I got the call that we’re gonna go on a trip if it was true. So maybe
part of it will go to the trip because I promised her that.”
Other prizes given were: Php 50,000 (three
winners), Php 10,000 (10winners), Php 2,000 (100 winners), and Mabuhay Miles
equivalent to roundtrip tickets to Cebu (two winners) and Hong Kong (two
winners).
Cash-lite is convenient
Lacerna said transactions done using the
BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay Prepaid Mastercard reap benefits both for the
merchant and cardholder with the improved security feature.
“When you use a card,
there is no tangible cash, plus you are also safe from robbers,” Watanabe said.
“Not having to bring
large amounts of cash with you is convenient. It just made things much easier,
not having to pull out cash from an ATM machine all the time,” Castillo added.
The BPI Debit Mastercard and BPI ePay
Prepaid Mastercard contain features unique among Philippine banks, such as
international debit acceptance, account linkage where the client has the
ability to view his multiple accounts in one card, card control where the
client can manage his withdrawal and purchase limits, enable or disable
international withdrawal access, temporarily block or unblock card, and
permanently tag card as lost, and soon, online payments for eCommerce sites.
The
cards can also be used for cashless in-store payments in shops where Mastercard
is accepted—from groceries, gas stations, coffee shops, restaurants, to
shopping stores, and more.
