Philippines BSP tightens rules for payment providers after hidden online casino activity

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has moved against a familiar high-risk trick: gambling businesses posing as ordinary merchants such as beauty salons, bakeries, and other small local shops. For PSPs, the message is blunt: merchant onboarding, category checks, and ongoing monitoring are now part of the licensing risk, not just compliance paperwork.

1. The BSP said it identified gambling activity disguised behind ordinary merchant profiles, with thousands of transactions starting at $0.80 (₱50) and above, plus payment spikes after midnight and into the early morning. On paper, the merchants looked harmless; in practice, the flow matched bets placed in illegal online casinos.
2. More than 8,000 merchant accounts were shut down. The BSP also said some real local businesses were hit as “fronts,” because their details were used to process the payments. That matters for PSPs because transaction laundering rarely stays neatly contained to the fake merchant.
3. The central bank has issued a draft of new requirements for PSPs. These include mandatory collection of beneficiary and merchant licensing data, maintaining databases of vetted merchants, and higher provider accountability for merchant activity, up to license revocation for a systematic failure to stop illegal actors.
4. Merchant aggregators are a separate focus. They speed up onboarding for small businesses, but they also blur visibility into the final recipient of funds, which is exactly the gap used to hide gambling traffic. For providers in high-risk verticals, that means the aggregator model now sits squarely in the regulator’s line of sight.
5. The Philippines has seen digital payments rise from 10% in 2018 to around 67% in 2025. That gives regulators a larger payments surface to police, and it also means patterns like micro-payments, night-time activity, and merchant-category mismatch are now easy hunting grounds for enforcement teams.