Accepting PayNow in Singapore

PayNow is Singapore’s real-time account-to-account payment scheme. Consumers send funds using a mobile number or NRIC; businesses receive them through PayNow Corporate by linking their UEN to a Singapore bank or major payment institution account. For a merchant, the defining characteristic is not the user experience but the rail: money moves bank to bank, in real time, with no card network in between.

SGQR

How to accept PayNow as a merchant

You do not contract with PayNow. You contract with your bank, your acquirer or your PSP, and they connect you to the scheme. PayNow Corporate requires a valid Singapore UEN linked to a settlement account. In a physical environment the QR is usually presented inside an SGQR label, the unified display standard developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority. MAS is explicit that SGQR does not replace an acquiring agreement: the label is a way to present schemes, not a commercial arrangement.

PayNow payment gateway and PSP support

Every gateway serving Singapore supports PayNow, so support is not a selection criterion. What separates providers is the fee per collection, whether it is charged as a flat amount or a percentage, how quickly funds settle, and the quality of the reconciliation data returned. That last point is underrated. Account-to-account payments arrive without the reference structure that card processing provides by default, and a provider that returns weak payment notifications shifts a real operational cost onto your finance team.

Blend

PayNow fees and what actually drives them

PayNow carries no interchange and no scheme fees in the card sense, which is why it usually prices well below card acceptance in Singapore. What you actually pay is set by your bank or PSP agreement, and it is where the variation lives. Under blended pricing the advantage disappears entirely: an account-to-account collection with no interchange gets averaged in with card volume that carries plenty, and the cheap rail quietly subsidises the expensive one. If PayNow is a meaningful share of your Singapore revenue and you cannot see its rate as a separate line, that is the first thing to fix.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the price of an account-to-account rail

The section above calls the quality of reconciliation data underrated. It is worth putting a number on it, because this is the one place where a cheap rail becomes an expensive one.

Three things to ask for, and they are specific. A unique reference per collection that survives all the way to your bank statement rather than being dropped somewhere in the chain. A notification carrying the amount, the timestamp and that reference, so an order can be marked paid without anybody looking at it. And a daily file that agrees with what actually settled, because a notification stream with no reconciling file leaves you trusting events you cannot audit.

Without those, somebody matches payments to orders by amount, which works until two customers pay the same amount on the same day. At 1,500 PayNow collections a month with three per cent unmatched, that is 45 items a month at, say, ten minutes each: about 90 hours a year, or roughly 3,000 euros of finance time spent maintaining a rail that was chosen because it was cheap. Ask what the reconciliation looks like before you sign rather than after your first month-end.

Which payment provider supports PayNow for merchants in Singapore?

HitPay and Red Dot Payment in Singapore, alongside Checkout.com and Stripe, all document PayNow, among others, as does every provider serving Singapore, which makes it the wrong opening question. The better one is what each charges per collection, on what basis, how fast they settle, and what reconciliation they hand back. Two merchants of comparable size can pay materially different amounts for the same PayNow transaction, and neither will know unless the line is isolated and benchmarked.

Regional

Your acceptance footprint is wider than your contract

The section on regional linkages says inbound customers can pay from their home banking app, and that this is worth confirming rather than assuming. Confirming it is worth money in two directions.

First the cost. Take 2 million euros of Singapore revenue with 12 per cent from regional visitors, so 240,000 euros. If those customers currently pay on international cards at an illustrative 2.6 per cent rather than through a linked QR at an illustrative 0.8 per cent, the difference is 4,320 euros a year on volume you are already receiving. Nothing about that requires a new integration. It requires knowing which linkages your own arrangement exposes in your QR and whether they are switched on.

Then the reporting, which is the part that persists. Ask whether inbound linked payments are reported separately from domestic PayNow, and at what rate the scheme-level conversion is applied. If they arrive as one undifferentiated line you cannot watch the regional volume grow, you cannot price it, and the next time you renegotiate you will be negotiating a number nobody has ever looked at. That is the same failure the rest of this page is about, arriving through a door nobody was watching.

Chargebacks, refunds and recurring collection

PayNow settles with finality. There is no card-style chargeback, which removes a category of loss and a category of cost at the same time. The trade-off is that refunds are outbound payments you initiate rather than reversals the scheme handles, and disputes are resolved commercially with your customer rather than through a scheme process. For recurring billing, GIRO direct debit remains the more natural instrument in Singapore, and the sensible design uses PayNow for one-off collection and GIRO for subscriptions rather than forcing one rail to do both.

Cross-border QR: PayNow’s regional linkages

PayNow connects directly to peer schemes across the region, with foreign exchange handled at scheme level. The linkage with Thailand’s PromptPay was the first of its kind globally, and connections now extend to DuitNow in Malaysia, QRIS in Indonesia, UPI in India and QR Ph in the Philippines. For a merchant serving regional visitors this means inbound customers can pay from their home banking app without holding Singapore dollars. It also means your acceptance footprint is wider than your contract may reflect, which is worth confirming with your acquirer rather than assuming.

Reviewing what PayNow costs you

What you pay to accept PayNow is set in your bank or PSP agreement, not by the scheme, and it is negotiable like every other line. If PayNow volume has grown since the arrangement was signed, the rate is unlikely to have moved with it. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

How a wallet behaves inside your flow, from one-click through to the return after a challenge, is a checkout flow optimisation question as much as a pricing one.

Relevant markets: Singapore