Singapore OCBC Bank will use Google Pay to support P2P transactions starting early in 2020, following a similar path as India, where banks have increasingly embraced Google Pay for transfers.
The partnership with Google will enable OCBC Bank customers to transfer funds to any bank customer using only their mobile phone number via PayNow, Singapore’s interbank account-to-account funds-transfer platform.
Singapore is the second country to leverage Google Pay for interbank transfers via PayNow, which launched in 2017 with support from nine leading Singapore banks, including OCBC. India’s banks two years ago added Google Pay to access UPI, India’s interbank P2P platform.
“The potential of Google Pay leveraging PayNow is tremendous and will provide our customers with the benefits of secure, seamless and ubiquitous payments without having a (physical) wallet,” said Ching Wei Hong, OCBC’s chief operating officer, in a release.
“OCBC has proven to be a valuable partner providing us with insights and expertise on payments, leveraging the national payment rails in Singapore,” said Caesar Sengupta, vice president of payments at the Next Billion Users initiative at Google, in the release.
