PayNow reaches over 2.8 million individual registrations

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

In all, 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 a 75 per cent increase over the 1.6 million individual registrations in August last year.

Education Minister Ong Ye Kung, in providing these figures in Parliament yesterday, said the take-up rate has been encouraging.

Mr Ong was responding on behalf of Senior Minister and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Tharman Shanmugaratnam, to Mr Ang Wei Neng (Jurong GRC).

In July this year, more than five million PayNow transactions, amounting to more than $1 billion, were made.

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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. This is 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 in September last year, more than 32,000 codes have been deployed here, Mr Ong said.

These include hawker centres, retail stores and supermarkets, representing a penetration rate of about 20 per cent.

But he added that more needs 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 with 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."