SINGAPORE — The number of PayNow transactions has reached five million as of July, compared to 150,000 when it was launched two years ago, Education Minister Ong Ye Kung told Parliament on Tuesday (Sept 3).

Over that period, the value of monthly transactions also grew from about S$24 million to more than S$1 billion. 

Mr Ong, who is a board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), was responding to Jurong Group Representation Constituency Member of Parliament Ang Wei Neng, who asked about the current adoption rate of PayNow and the Government’s plan to further grow the adoption rate of cashless transactions here.

Replying on behalf of Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also Minister-in-charge of MAS, Mr Ong said that since the launch of PayNow in July 2017, there have been 2.8 million individual registrations. Of this, 1.8 million are bank accounts linked to mobile phone numbers, with the remainder linked to identity card numbers.

Mr Ong added that the Government estimates that there are more than 65 per cent of Singaporeans aged between 20 and 75 years old who have already registered for PayNow and the numbers are “still increasing”. 

PayNow enables customers of participating banks to transfer money to others using only their mobile numbers or identity card numbers.

As for PayNow Corporate, which was launched in August last year and allows companies to pay and receive money instantly from other firms and customers, Mr Ong said that over 115,000 unique entity numbers have been registered.

This represents approximately half of the total number of unique entity numbers issued to active businesses, he said, adding that the numbers are also on an upward trend.

In response to Mr Ang’s question on the adoption rate of QR code payments, Mr Ong pointed out that following the launch of the country’s national QR code in September last year, over 32,000 of such codes have been deployed across hawker centres, supermarkets and healthcare outlets, among other locations.

“This represents a penetration rate of about 20 per cent of all retail acceptance points nationwide, so there is more work to do,” Mr Ong said.

Reiterating the Government’s approach in promoting e-payments in Singapore, Mr Ong said: “We made a deliberate decision to not have one player dominate the landscape.

“Instead, we put in place the backbone infrastructure, so that multiple providers can compete and innovate to increase consumer choice, while encouraging interoperability.”