7 Facts About PayNow and FAST As They’ll Be Opened Non-Bank Financial Institutes Like GrabPay

On 30 Nov 2020, it was reported that funds transfer services, PayNow and FAST, will soon be open to even more users, including non-bank financial institutes (NFI) like GrabPay.

To understand why this is a huge milestone for Singapore’s e-payment landscape, you need to first understand what PayNow and FAST are all about.

Here are 7 facts about PayNow and Fast that you need to know.

1. Fast & Secure Transfers (FAST)

Before 2014, if you need to transfer money from DBS bank to UOB, you’ll need at least 2 to 3 working days before the funds can be transferred to the other account successfully.

However, with FAST, Singapore Dollars (SGD) funds can be transferred between participating banks almost immediately.

Available 24 hours, 7 days a week, you can transfer up to S$200,000 per transaction, subject to your daily transfer limit.

2. Why FAST?

According to the Association of Banks Singapore (ABS), FAST was created because there was a need for more efficient funds transfers from both consumers and businesses.

The list of banks chosen to participate was because they made up the bulk of the interbank GIRO transactions in Singapore.

They started with 20 but has since increased.

Other than speed, FAST is also secure and uses the same standards used by banks in Singapore for funds transfers.

3. Participating Banks

The service was launched on 17 Mar 2020 and has 23 participating banks in Singapore:

• ANZ Bank
• Bank of China
• The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ
• BNP Paribas
• CIMB Bank
• Citibank NA
• Citibank Singapore Limited
• DBS Bank/POSB
• Deutsche Bank
• HL Bank
• HSBC
• HSBC Bank (Singapore) Limited
• ICICI Bank Limited Singapore
• Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited
• Maybank Singapore Limited
• Malayan Banking Berhad
• Mizuho Bank
• OCBC Bank
• RHB Bank
• Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore) Limited
• Sing Investments & Finance Limited
• Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
• United Overseas Bank

To use FAST, all you need is a savings or currents account with any one of the participating banks.

The recipient must also have a savings or currents account at a participating bank.

4. PayNow

If you think FAST is convenient enough, PayNow will have you reeling in shock.

Launched on 10 Jul 2017, it’s a peer-to-peer FAST transfer service for retail customers of nine participating banks in Singapore.

The service allows retail customers to transfer funds to recipients with just their mobile phone number of their Singapore NRIC/FIN instantly.

Provided free-of-charge, PayNow also operates 24 hours, seven days a week.

5. Participating Banks (PayNow)

Currently, banks offering the PayNow service are:

• Bank of China
• Citibank Singapore Limited
• DBS Bank/POSB
• HSBC
• Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited
• Maybank
• OCBC Bank
• Standard Chartered Bank
• UOB

There’s a similar PayNow service for coporations offered by these nine banks which allows retail customers to make payments to companies.

6. Highly-Secured Service

I know what you’re thinking. If it’s so convenient, is it still safe?

According to ABS, the PayNow service, while conveying many conveniences to people in Singapore, remains highly-secured.

For one, the end-to-end payment of a PayNow transaction adopts the same standards that banks in Singapore use for funds transfers.

Also, information (such as NRIC and mobile phone number) is collected from the banks when the account is being set up.

This means that anyone who tries to use anyone else’s NRIC number to set up a proxy account will be rejected.

And in an effort to stave off human error, there’s a verification page that will display the account holder’s name which users can check before confirming the transfer.

Notifications will also be sent out to both sender and recipient to notify about a successful transfer.

7. What Happens If You’ve Transferred Wrongly Anyway

So, let’s say you entered a 6 instead of a 9 and you’ve transferred $200 to the wrong person.

What do you do?

According to a CNA report in 2019, you can give the person a call or text and request your money back.

Most times, they are more than happy to return it to you, DBS senior vice-president (Consumer Payments and Platforms) Tri Arini Melati said.

However, if they refused to do so, you can actually sue or report them to the police.

Anyone who has the intention to use money that doesn’t belong to them can be jailed for up to two years and/or fined.

According to Loh Kia Meng, chief operating officer of law firm Dentons Rodyk, as long as notice is sent out, even if the person didn’t read or threw it away, he would still be considered as having been notified of, in this case, the wrong transfer.

The Trend

You’re probably seeing the trend here now.

Interbank GIRO was troublesome, so they came up with FAST.

FAST has bank account numbers, which is troublesome because these numbers are hard to memorise (or type in), so they created PayNow.

And now, because of the disconnect between e-wallets and bank accounts, they are allowing non-banks to join in the FAST and PayNow systems.

Opening Up PayNow and FAST To Non-Bank Financial Institutes

From Feb 2021, the Monetary Association of Singapore (MAS) announced, non-bank financial institutes (NFI) will be given access to the retail banking infrastructure.

Only NFIs that are labelled as “major payment institutes” will be allowed to connect to FAST and PayNow.

This includes Grab financial group which operates GrabPay, Singtel Dash and Razer Fintech, which runs Razer’s e-wallet.

Basically, what this will do is that with the retail infrastructure, people no longer need a debit or credit card to top up their e-wallets.

They can transfer funds directly from their POSB savings account to their GrabPay account.

“The Last Mile of E-payments”

Not everyone has access to a debit or credit card.

With this move, it will make e-payment adoption even higher since everyone can technically create and fund their own e-wallets now.

It’s also great for businesses or merchants as they’ll be able to accept real-time payments from e-wallets and applications that will be joining FAST or PayNow.

The Direct Fast Working Group, guided by the Singapore Clearing House Association and ABS, managed to create an API gateway which allows NFIs to connect to the system.

With this, the authorities are hoping that Singapore has just taken a giant step towards a cashless Singapore.

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