State-owned Land Bank of the Philippines and Visa have rolled out a credit card program for government agencies aimed at reducing reliance on cash advances and strengthening digital oversight of public spending.
The Government Purchase Card (GPC), which works like a corporate credit card, can be used for low-value procurement, official travel and recurring operational expenses.
LandBank aims to enroll 2,000 government agencies by year-end, starting with the Bureau of the Treasury and its 16 regional offices nationwide. The program is designed to replace paper-based cash advances and liquidation processes with card payments that can be digitally tracked.
“In particular, this will cut the manual processes of paper-based cash advances as well as liquidation. It works like a credit card. Just use your card and then upon billing cycle, the agency will have to pay the entire amount,” LandBank Executive Vice President Marilou Villafranca said in a briefing.
The cards will have customizable spending limits and merchant category restrictions to control how government funds can be used.
“There is a limit. This will be discussed. It could vary per agency depending on what they require and what they’re used to…their spend,” said Kris Cuevas, First Vice President of LandBank’s Retail Banking Group.
Transactions will feed into an integrated expense management portal scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter, covering transaction logging, reconciliation, approval workflows and reporting.
The system will also allow the Commission on Audit (COA) to access spending information as transactions are recorded.
“From the time you use your card, that’s already transparent in the expense management system. You will immediately see how you used your cards. And also, this expense management system can be viewed by the Commission on Audit. So we can give them access and they can see the spending,” Villafranca said.
The partnership expands Visa’s involvement in the government’s push to digitize payments and financial processes.
“It’s designed to improve efficiency, strengthen financial control, and really give the government agencies more visibility over their spend,” said Jeffrey Navarro, Visa Philippines Country Manager. “This initiative really helps the government in terms of minimizing, if not eliminating manual processes. And the good thing about that is government agencies can now really focus in terms of delivery of service if we minimize a lot of these processes.”
