The BSP wants GCash, Maya and banks to check you against the national ID
A draft rule gives e-wallets, digital banks and crypto apps three months from the day it is signed to plug into the government's ID checker. Uploading a photo of your ID stops being the way in.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas put out a draft memorandum this week that would require the banks and apps it supervises to run your identity through the government's own ID system before they let you open an account. The system is called NIDAS, the National ID Authentication Services, built by the Philippine Statistics Authority with the Department of Information and Communications Technology. It checks a person in real time by matching their face and their details against the national ID database.
The rollout comes in two waves, counted from the day the memorandum is actually signed. First wave, three months: universal and commercial banks with retail branches, digital banks, electronic money issuers, which is the category GCash and Maya sit in, and virtual asset service providers, meaning licensed crypto exchanges. Second wave, six months: the remaining commercial banks, thrift banks, rural and cooperative banks, and payment operators that verify customers or merchants. A company counts as compliant once it files a complete application with the PSA, not once the plumbing is finished.
What changes when you open an account
Today you upload a photo of a plastic ID and wait for a human or a scanner to accept it. Under the draft, the app pings National ID eVerify instead, and a successful match on your face and your details satisfies the ID requirement on its own. The BSP is explicit about it: for a first-time customer, the confirmation NIDAS sends back stands in place of a physical or printed national ID. Institutions that have not finished their own NIDAS onboarding are told to use a simpler platform, National ID Check, in the meantime.
Why it matters
As of end-October last year, 90.29 million Filipinos were registered under the national ID system, about 80 percent of the population, according to PSA data. That is a big enough base that one shared check can replace a hundred different ID review desks. It is aimed at two specific problems: people abandoning sign-ups halfway because the manual ID upload is tedious, and fake or edited ID cards getting through. If you have ever been rejected by an e-wallet for a blurry ID photo, that step is the one going away.
The catch to watch
This is still a draft, so nothing is running yet and the three-month clock only starts when the BSP signs it. Roughly one in five Filipinos is still not registered, and the draft says so in its own way: banks may keep using other valid IDs where no national ID is presented or where NIDAS is unavailable. The most ambitious tier, the one that would let companies match your ID token across each other, is written into the rules but is not operational. And the tradeoff is real. Every account opening now leans on one government service staying online and staying private, which is why the same draft tells banks to keep their anti-money-laundering, cybersecurity and data protection controls in place rather than assume the ID check covers them.