Bank of the Philippine Islands is preparing a stablecoin-based settlement pilot for inbound cross-border payments, beginning with overseas payroll received by Philippine freelancers, virtual assistants and other workers.
The Philippine bank is developing the system with digital clearing network Meridian. Local reports say stablecoins would serve as an intermediate settlement instrument before funds are converted into Philippine pesos and credited to recipients’ BPI accounts.
This is a planned pilot, not a live commercial service. BPI has not publicly disclosed the stablecoin, blockchain network, foreign-currency corridors, launch date, pricing or transaction limits. The bank also has not published measured results on settlement speed or cost.
A bank-account endpoint for stablecoin settlement
The design is notable because the recipient would receive a conventional peso bank balance rather than needing to manage a token or crypto wallet. For customers, that could keep the stablecoin leg behind the payment interface. For payment operators, however, the difficult work remains at the boundaries: funding the token leg, screening the parties, managing liquidity and conversion, reconciling the transfer to bank ledgers and handling failures or reversals.
BPI said the initial focus would be payroll credits for workers receiving income from overseas. It plans to make the service available to a broader client base ahead of the 49th ASEAN Summit in November, according to reports carrying the bank’s announcement. That is a stated rollout objective rather than a guaranteed deployment date.
BPI President and CEO TG Limcaoco framed the project as an extension of the bank’s digitalization strategy, with the goal of making inbound payments faster and less expensive without weakening security. No fee schedule or benchmark was disclosed, so the eventual customer benefit will depend on the full cost of stablecoin acquisition, settlement, currency conversion and payout—not only the speed of the blockchain transaction.
Regulatory and operating questions remain
BPI said it would conduct the pilot in coordination with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The bank identified regulatory compliance, consumer protection and reserve transparency as requirements during the trial, while any expansion would depend on meeting those safeguards.
That qualification is important for banks evaluating similar models. A stablecoin can shorten one part of a cross-border payment path, but it also introduces issuer, reserve, redemption and liquidity dependencies. Banks must determine who bears those risks during the transfer and what happens if conversion or payout is delayed after the token leg has settled.
The pilot also leaves several commercial questions open. BPI and Meridian have not said whether senders will access the rail directly or through payroll platforms and payment providers, which entity will source the stablecoins, or whether the system will support only inbound dollar-to-peso flows. Those details will determine whether the project changes the correspondent-banking path or simply adds a new settlement option behind an existing remittance product.
What payments providers should watch
The most meaningful milestone will be a completed, measured pilot rather than the announcement itself. Useful evidence would include end-to-end settlement times, total customer cost, failed-payment handling, supported corridors, stablecoin and chain selection, liquidity arrangements and the controls applied at both the funding and payout endpoints.
Until those details are available, BPI’s project is best understood as a bank-led test of stablecoins as back-end settlement infrastructure. Its significance lies less in exposing crypto to retail users than in testing whether tokenized value can connect overseas payment originators to regulated peso accounts while preserving familiar bank controls.