Three companies applied for a Philippine digital banking license before the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ November 30, 2025 deadline. As of this month, none of them has been approved, and the central bank still won’t commit to when — or whether — that will change before the end of 2026.
BSP Deputy Governor Lyn Javier, who heads the Financial Supervision Sector, put it plainly in July: asked if the licenses could arrive by year-end, her answer was “in due time… I cannot say so.” Governor Eli Remolona Jr. has since confirmed the delay is structural rather than incidental — the central bank is still reconciling two different regulatory pathways, one for digital banks built from scratch and another for banks converting from an existing rural bank charter — and has said any approvals that do come will be announced one applicant at a time rather than as a group.
The Loophole That Slowed Everything Down
The bottleneck traces back to a real regulatory gap the BSP only recently closed: for years, fintech companies could acquire a cheap rural bank license — as little as 50 to 200 million pesos in capital — and use it to operate a nationwide digital banking service, sidestepping the far stricter capital and governance requirements of an actual digital bank charter. In March, the BSP issued new prudential rules tying a rural bank’s permitted scale directly to its digital adoption rate, requiring up to 1 billion pesos in capital once three-quarters of a rural bank’s customers are transacting digitally. MariBank — formerly SeaBank Philippines, a Sea Limited subsidiary — became the direct beneficiary of that untangled process, formally converting into the country’s seventh licensed digital bank on July 18 after the Monetary Board approved its upgrade. The three brand-new applicants, without an existing charter to convert, are stuck waiting for the BSP to finish reconciling the very framework MariBank just moved through.
A Ten-Slot Cap That Isn’t Filling Up Predictably
The BSP lifted its original three-year moratorium on new digital bank licenses in January 2025 and raised the national cap to ten players, up from the six operating at the time — Tonik, GoTyme, Maya, Overseas Filipino Bank, UNObank, and UnionDigital. With MariBank’s conversion, seven of those ten slots are now filled, leaving three theoretical openings for the three pending applicants — if they’re ever approved. But even a favorable outcome for all three still runs into a second bottleneck entirely outside the BSP’s control: SEC registration of articles of incorporation, a step that carries its own 15-day processing window, followed by a further five working days for the BSP to issue an actual certificate of authority once the earlier steps clear. The central bank has flagged the SEC phase specifically as the step most responsible for the unpredictable timeline, since it depends on the Commission’s own processing queue rather than the BSP’s own evaluation calendar.
Remolona has also been explicit that new entrants face materially different prudential requirements than the digital banks that got in earlier by converting from an existing rural bank charter — MariBank’s own path. That two-track reality means the three pending applicants aren’t simply waiting in a queue behind MariBank; they’re being evaluated against a different, and by most accounts stricter, standard than the one that just cleared a seventh operator into the market, which helps explain why the central bank has been unwilling to commit to a date even informally.
The Market Isn’t Waiting for the Paperwork
While the licensing process stalls, the underlying digital-payments infrastructure the new entrants would be competing in keeps growing regardless. InstaPay, the country’s real-time low-value payment rail, saw monthly transaction volume explode from 99.4 million in March 2024 to 693 million by March 2026 — nearly a sevenfold increase in two years, and a clear signal that Filipino consumers and merchants are moving money digitally at a pace the licensing bureaucracy hasn’t kept up with. The seven digital banks already operating aren’t standing still either, competing hard for the same underbanked customer base the three pending applicants are hoping to eventually serve, which means every additional month of regulatory delay is a month of market share the current incumbents get to consolidate before new competition arrives.
What Founders Should Watch Next
For any Philippine fintech founder building toward an eventual banking license — rather than partnering with an existing digital bank — this is a concrete data point on how long “getting to yes” with financial regulators can actually take, even once the policy door is technically open. The gap between “the moratorium was lifted” (January 2025) and “an actual new-from-scratch license was granted” (still pending, 19 months later) is the more honest timeline to plan around than the announcement itself was. Founders whose business models depend on securing a banking charter, rather than operating as a licensed e-money issuer or partnering with one of the seven existing digital banks, should treat regulatory approval as a multi-year capital and patience commitment, not a formality to be modeled into a Series A timeline.
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