Quarantine restrictions put in place to address the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) resulted to the surge in Social Security System’ (SSS) electronic transactions in 2020.

In a virtual briefing Wednesday, SSS Executive Vice President Judy Frances A. See said transactions through the agency’s electronic channels accounted for 75 percent of the total in 2020, up from around 35 percent in the previous year.

Manual transactions, in turn, dropped from 65 percent of the total in 2019 to just 25 percent last year, she said.

For last January alone, access to the My.SSS portal registered average transactions of around 70,590 daily.

See said registration to the My.SSS portal rose by 140.8 percent last year from the about 1.36 transactions in the previous year.

“We already have a total of 10.6 million registrations in My.SSS under the SSS website,” she said.

Relatively, the SSS executive said contribution payments done through electronic channels accounted for 99.3 percent last year.

SSS also registered an 11.14 times jump in the download of its mobile app last year from the 3.12 million downloads as of end-December 2019.

“So there’s really a surge or a big increase in the number of online transactions last year, in 2020. This was brought about the pandemic, when there is limited mobility and our members cannot go to the SSS branches also,” she added.

To date, SSS services that can be done through the My.SSS portal include applications for calamity loan, pension loan, retirement benefit (subject to qualifying conditions for online filing), unemployment benefit, and funeral claim.

SSS members can also submit through the portal requests for member data change for simple corrections for members, and submission of sickness benefit reimbursement application for employers.