PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay complete the world's first faster payment systems linkage
The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) announced that effective today, the linkage between Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s prequivalent PromptPay has been established, enabling retail customers of participating banks from both countries to securely perform cross-border fund transfers using only mobile numbers.
PayNow was launched in 2017 as a convenient way to make domestic interbank transfers, with this linkage, customers would now be able to transact at near real-time speed at a fee that is competitive to remittance services. The sender would no longer need to know and complete account details of recipients before making a payment to Thailand and vice versa.
The linkage between the two countries' national faster payment systems is the first of its kind in the world.
The project began discussion in 2018 from an agreement between MAS and Bank of Thailand (BOT) to work together on this linkage. Besides working around the operational and governance characteristics of the PayNow and PromptPay schemes, the cross-border nature of the transactions requires robust anti-money laundering and sanction screening risks mitigations to be put in place. Alignments on target operating model, business rules, technical connectivity as well as legal framework are needed to provide seamless experience and convenience to consumers of both countries.
At this initial phase, the linkage is established with 3 banks in Singapore (DBS, OCBC and UOB) and 4 banks in Thailand (Bangkok Bank, Kasikorn Bank, Krung Thai Bank, Siam Commercial Bank) to cater for small value peer-to-peer transactions (less than SGD1,000 or THB25,000). Over time, participating banks and use cases will be scaled up and expanded.
Mr Wee Ee Cheong, ABS Chairman, Deputy Chairman and CEO of UOB, said: “We welcome the industry initiative to link PromptPay with PayNow as this will make cross-border funds transfers between Singapore and Thailand customers simpler and smarter. This initiative is also an important step to connecting payment systems across ASEAN at scale in the future, enabling more bank customers to send money to their friends and families and to pay for goods and services quickly, simply and safely across borders.”
Mr Lawrence Chan, Chairman of Banking Computer Services Pte Ltd (BCS) and NETS’ Group CEO said, “For the first time ever, this innovative payment systems linkage will extend peer-to-peer payment frontiers beyond Singapore to Thailand. As the operator of PayNow and FAST, we are extremely proud to be part of this trailblazing effort to connect communities, essentially a world first to enable banks’ retail customers to perform cross-border fund transfers using mobile numbers.”
Latest News
Recommended news