The race to a cashless Singapore has just picked up, as Nets announced yesterday that merchants can now get their hands on its terminals one day after submitting their applications online.

This new service will save them the hassle of submitting application forms by hand, which can take up to two weeks to process, Nets said.

The e-payments company added that the initiative is part of its digital transformation journey to "enhance its service for merchants, increase productivity within the organisation and improve its speed to market".

Nets noted that as account details will be keyed in directly by the merchant, manual labour and data entry errors will be minimised, allowing the merchant to come onboard in one working day, compared with two weeks previously.

Merchants can pick up their terminals from the Nets customer service centre at their convenience, and start using Nets services a day after their application, the company said.

Online applications made up 5 per cent of new applications since the service was launched last month, Nets said.

The company said it has also equipped its sales team with tablets to speed up the onboarding process for non-retail merchants such as hawkers.

This enables straight-through processing of any application as information on the tablet is uploaded directly to Nets' operations centre.

Since last month, some 50 sales personnel have been testing the tablet solution for onboarding hawkers and food stall operators, Nets said. Today, Nets terminals support Nets chip and PIN transactions, credit card payments, and contactless payments such as Apple Pay.

Last week, Nets announced that customers of OCBC Bank and United Overseas Bank can digitally store their Nets ATM bank cards on the NETSPay mobile app, allowing them to make Nets payments through their mobile phones instead of using their physical Nets ATM bank cards.

NETSPay, which was unveiled last October, was previously available only to DBS/POSB customers.