Ours is a growing and consuming population which transacts about 2.5 billion payments per month in cash and check payments with electronic transactions at only 1% of the total. This represents opportunities to technology innovations that will extend the reach of efficient and competitive payments systems across our country.
After all, our people embrace technology and mobile communications in a manner that has raised our mobile phones to around 110 million, more than our population. In the last nine quarters, we saw deposit accounts grow by nearly 7 million or 17.5% to nearly 47 million. About 93% of the new accounts have outstanding balances of about one hundred thousand pesos or less.