Singapore’s digital payment scenario has made a huge boom even before COVID-19. The latest add-on comes with e-wallet businesses Singtel Dash, Grab Financial Group, and Liquid Group’s collaboration with PayNow, Singapore’s national payments system, to avail peer-to-peer fund transfer services to non-banks.
This first-of-a-kind deal has led to the creation of a new PayNow proxy named Virtual Payment Address to offer fund transfer between bank accounts and e-wallets. The proxy enables users by linking their mobile numbers with an e-wallet offered by the NFIs, all while retaining their current PayNow registration.
Later this year, users will take the aid of non-bank financial institutions (NFIs) to transact with merchants by scanning their PayNow-Singapore Quick Response Code (SGQR) which makes use of QR codes for all payment providers.
According to the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), the latest addition of the three NFIs will boost the adoption and usage of PayNow and expedite Singapore’s path towards a cashless digital economy.
The Singapore government supports digital payments with changes like PayNow, the national real-time peer-to-peer payment platform, introduced in 2017. PayNow enables cashless transactions between bank accounts with the recipient’s identification card number or smartphone.