Wednesday, 24 April 2024
OCBC Bank becomes first FI to enable P2P transfers on Google Pay in Singapore
OCBC Bank has become the first financial institution to bring Google Pay’s peer-to-peer (P2P) funds transfer service to Singapore, making it the third country alongside the United States and India where this service is available.
With the integration of the Google Pay transaction services with OCBC Bank customer accounts, customers have one more option for P2P transfers and payment for purchases since February 2020. A flexible and multifaceted digital payment capability is strategically important for any consumer bank today.
OCBC Bank’s head of global wealth management and consumer banking Wei Hong Ching said, “OCBC has long been a champion supporting open payment ecosystems and promoting national payment schemes. With this partnership with Google Pay, OCBC customers can choose to pay their friends using Google Pay in addition to OCBC Pay Anyone with their linked OCBC Bank accounts. This is a testament to our partnership-driven strategy that has led us to develop a wide suite of payment solutions.”
“Singaporeans continue to significantly increase their use of PayNow, with more than 70 million transactions worth $8.6 billion (SGD 12.16 billion) in 2019. We believe that our partnership with Google Pay will continue to help drive this trend in 2020 and beyond. Our robust payments, clearing and settlement infrastructure already enabled us to process digital and mobile payments at scale. We have leveraged our existing capabilities to drive continuous innovation and to regularly launch updates and new solutions,” Ching added.
According to Ching, OCBC Bank rejected the digital wallet approach and put a lot of effort into developing OCBC Pay Anyone, where customers can literally ‘pay anyone’ directly from their bank accounts. “With Google Pay strengthening it further, we expect to see the continued rise for the adoption rate of digital payments solutions among our customers in Singapore,” he said.
Caesar Sengupta, vice president of payments and the Next Billion Users initiative at Google, said, “We’re excited to have OCBC as our inaugural launch partner for the new Google Pay in Singapore. It was a pleasure working with the team to design and build Google Pay for Singapore so customers can provision their OCBC Bank accounts and leverage the national rails via PayNow for transactions. We’re delighted that OCBC shares our mission to make mobile payments simple, helpful and secure.”
OCBC Bank customers can download the Google Pay mobile app onto their iOS or Android devices to make instant P2P transactions through PayNow, tapping on funds in their current or savings accounts. Google Pay harnesses PayNow to enable a customer to make real-time money transfers to all contacts who have linked their bank accounts to their mobile numbers.
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
