The extension of the service PayNow to businesses - called PayNow Corporate and available from Monday - is set to bring convenience and cost savings to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), market players said.
PayNow is a peer-to-peer fund transfer service that lets customers of participating banks instantly send and receive money using just their mobile or NRIC numbers.
PayNow Corporate allows businesses and the Singapore Government to instantly pay and receive money using the organisations' unique entity numbers.
It will be available from 8am on Monday.
PayNow QR will also be launched at the same time to enable consumers and businesses to scan the merchant QR code on invoices or websites to make payments.
The seven banks involved in PayNow Corporate are United Overseas Bank, DBS Bank/POSB, OCBC Bank, Citibank, HSBC, Maybank and Standard Chartered Bank.
An OCBC survey found that two in three SMEs in Singapore are likely to go cashless by 2023. The bank, which released its findings yesterday, polled 200 such companies and more than 45 per cent said they are likely to go cashless as early as 2020.
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45%
Percentage of respondents in an OCBC survey involving 200 SMEs which said they are likely to go cashless as early as 2020.
Cake cafe Lady M has gone cashless at its outlets at South Beach and Scotts Square and found such benefits as a reduction in the time it spent on billing and, for customers, on waiting. It accepts only non-cash payment methods like Alipay.
Besides the seven banks named, another two will join them to offer PayNow services, the Association of Banks in Singapore had said in April. These are the Bank of China as well as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and they will bring the pool of participants to nine banks.
