Friday, 19 April 2024
DBS pledges to keep digital adoption costs low and affordable for SMEs and corporates, helping them to realise their digital ambitions
DBS pledged to keep the cost of adopting digital solutions affordable for Singaporean SMEs and corporates. With PayNow Corporate going ‘live’ on Monday, 13 August, DBS will be waiving all ‘inward’ PayNow fees for SMEs and corporates from 13 August 2018 to 31 December 2019. DBS also expects to register more than 21,000 SMEs by end 2019.
The waiver was introduced to encourage companies to go cashless, paperless and reduce time spent on paper-based administrative tasks. With PayNow Corporate, businesses large and small can expect to receive payments instantly instead of the current time of two working days taken for cheques to be processed and cleared. DBS expects fees on more than 1 million inward PayNow Corporate transactions to be waived in the next 18 months.
PayNow Corporate enables business owners and the Singapore Government to link their Unique Entity Number (UEN) directly to their bank accounts of participating banks. This will enable them to receive payment without the need to disclose details such as account numbers. To make PayNow payments even simpler and more seamless, PayNow QR will be jointly launched in conjunction with PayNow Corporate in its upcoming debut. With PayNow QR, consumers and businesses will be able to scan the merchant QR code in invoices, websites and many other mediums, to make payments at their convenience and on-the-go.
Jasmin Ng, Managing Director, Group Transaction Services, DBS Bank said, “Changing perceptions and old habits are the key challenges for many new corporate digital initiatives. We are heartened by the results DBS has seen so far, with adoption rates for digital payment methods on an uptrend among our corporate customers. DBS has seen widespread interest in PayNow Corporate from all segments of our clients including government clients such as Singapore Land Authority, insurance companies such as AIG as well as leading retailers and F&B chains.”
Powered by the DBS Corporate Banking platform, the DBS IDEAL RAPID API gateway, corporate customers have already mandated DBS to enable PayNow Corporate and PayNow QR for instant and end-to-end fulfilment. By automating the payment to confirmation process for PayNow Corporate, DBS is helping customers to embed PayNow in their business processes, reducing risks, enhancing controls and increasing productivity in the process.
Mr. Tang Kwang Boon, Director, Finance & Corporate Services at Singapore Land Authority said, “SLA is happy to be one of the early adopters of PayNow Corporate to support our nation’s drive towards a Smart cashless society and economy. By availing this additional e-payment mode with strong support from DBS, we seek to bring greater convenience to our customers, as part of our continuous effort to improve service delivery.”
Ms. Claudia Salem, CEO of AIG Singapore and Head of Country Operations Southeast Asia said, “Together with DBS, AIG Singapore pioneered direct payments for travel claims through PayNow this year and this marks another step in our digital transformation journey. We are proud of our joint effort with DBS, and to be the first general insurer to implement end-to-end PayNow capabilities for our travel insurance customers. We have plans to progressively roll out this payment service across our other products and services so that more customers can benefit from this convenient and seamless experience.”
Cash flow is the lifeblood of many SMEs. One example is ToTT, a kitchenware company with two outlets in Singapore. “We are looking forward to the introduction of Corporate PayNow as it will help increase our business productivity,” said Melissa Chew, Marketing Manager, ToTT.
To prepare customers for the introduction of PayNow Corporate, DBS has also invested more than 1000 hours over the last 12 months training close to 1000 corporate and SME customers on how to transform their domestic payments and receipts processes and automate accounts reconciliation.
Notably, the investment in time is paying off as there has been a greater acceptance of e-payment solutions such as Giro, FAST and now PayNow. Today, 92% of all payment transactions carried out by DBS’ corporate customers are done digitally.
Since 2017, DBS has introduced a slew of innovative solutions as well as differentiated pricing structures to speed up electronic payments and funds transfer adoption among its corporate clients.
They range from a complete waiver of monthly charges for usage of its corporate banking platform IDEAL, to dramatically reducing FAST pricing from SGD 5 to a low SGD 0.50. DBS also launched corporate bill payments via IDEAL earlier this year, enabling all its corporate clients to pay bills online. With these offerings, DBS has seen payments via FAST grow by more than 300% and digital payments increase by 25% amongst corporate clients.
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
