Parliament: More than six in 10 Singaporeans signed up for PayNow, service has 2.8 million registrations

In July this year, there were more than five million PayNow transactions amounting to more than $1 billion, while in the first month after PayNow was launched, there were about 150,000 transactions totalling about $24 million. ST PHOTO: KELVIN CHNG

SINGAPORE - More than 65 per cent of Singaporeans aged between 20 and 75 have registered for national fund transfer service PayNow since it launched in July 2017.

Education Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Tuesday (Sept 3) that there have been 2.8 million individual registrations for PayNow, of which 1.8 million are bank accounts linked to mobile phones and the rest linked to NRIC numbers.

This is up from 1.6 million registrations last August.

The take-up rate has been encouraging, said Mr Ong, who was responding to Mr Ang Wei Neng (Jurong GRC) on behalf of Senior Minister and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

In July this year, there were more than five million PayNow transactions amounting to more than $1 billion. Mr Ong noted that in the first month after PayNow was launched, there were about 150,000 transactions totalling about $24 million.

He also gave an update on the take-up rate for PayNow Corporate, an extension of PayNow that allows businesses and the Government to instantly make and receive payments by using their respective Unique Entity Numbers (UENs).

More than 115,000 UENs have been registered, which represent about half of the total number of UENs issued to active businesses, he said.

Mr Ang also asked about the adoption rate of e-payments using Quick-Response (QR) codes here, to which Mr Ong brought up the Government's introduction of the national QR code SGQR, which consolidated various payment schemes into a single code.

Since the launch of SGQR last Sept, Mr Ong said more than 32,000 codes have been deployed here.

These cut across a range of merchants that include hawker centres, retail stores and supermarkets, and represents a penetration rate of about 20 per cent.

Zooming in on hawker centres, the minister said SGQR labels have been deployed at more than 500 stalls spread over 10 hawker centres, 22 coffee shops and 12 industrial estates.

Out of every five e-payment transactions at these stalls, four are used with SGQR.

But he added that more has to be done to encourage the take-up of e-payments, as cash still remains the most popular way of payment at hawker centres.

He said: "While the volume of e-payments is still low compared to cash, we expect it to grow.

"E- payments are convenient to use at hawker stalls, and payment operators are looking into ways to make it even more convenient for hawkers."

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