BPI aims to boost cashless shopping with EMV Debit and Prepaid Card
BPI Cardholders Wednesday, September 04, 2019
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.
