Singapore, Malaysia facilitate borderless payment

Illustrative image (Photo: Straitimes)

Singapore (VNA) – The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) plan to begin a phased linkage of Malaysia’s DuitNow and Singapore’s PayNow real-time payment systems in late 2022.

Accordingly, customers of participating financial institutions will be allowed to make real-time fund transfers between Malaysia and Singapore using just a mobile number.

They will also be able to make retail payments by scanning DuitNow or NETS QR codes displayed at merchants’ storefronts.

"The project will enable more seamless payments for the high volume of remittances between Malaysia and Singapore," the BNM said in a statement on September 27.

The central bank said the project would also cater to travellers between both countries, which saw sizeable pre-pandemic traffic of about 12 million arrivals yearly on average.

On September 14, the MAS and the Indian central bank also announced a similar plan to link PayNow with India’s Unified Payments Interface in July 2022./.