Google Debuts P2P Fund Transfers in Singapore

With OCBC enabling peer-to-peer (P2P) fund transfers on Google Pay, the city-state becomes the third globally to offer the service, after India and the United States.

The integration means that OCBC customers can now transfer or receive payments directly from their bank accounts to or from anyone registered to PayNow using the Google Pay app, the bank announced in a statement this week.

At the same time, bank account holders without credit cards can also Google Pay to make payments to merchants in Singapore.

We have long rejected the ‘digital wallet’ approach that requires customers to top up an e-wallet and hold funds in one without earning interest. Instead, we put a lot of effort into developing OCBC Pay Anyone as an open-loop payment system, whereby customers literally ‘pay anyone’ directly from their bank accounts, Ching Wei Hong, OCBC head of Global Wealth Management & Consumer Banking, said.

Introduced in 2017, Singapore’s national e-payments system PayNow enables digital payments directly between customers’ bank accounts and funds transfers using their recipients’ mobile numbers.

The integration of Google Pay and PayNow is expected to significantly impact the adoption and usage of PayNow in Singapore, which already recorded more than 70 million transactions worth S$12.16 billion in 2019, OCBC noted.

Google previously said it is looking at adding more banks to Google Pay, including DBS and Standard Chartered, with launches expected by the end of 2020.