Bangkok, April 29, (dpa/GNA) – Singapore and Thailand on Thursday announced a new a cross-border mobile phone-based payments system that the city-state’s central bank branded “the first of its kind globally.”
Years in the making, the system links Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay and means users “will be able to transfer funds of up to 1,000 [Singapore dollars] or 25,000 [Thai baht] daily across the two countries, using just a mobile number,” the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said.
The amounts are equivalent to 750-800 US dollars.
The service will mirror how PayNow and PromptPay operate domestically as “real-time retail payment systems,” meaning “there will be no need to populate information fields such as the recipient’s full name and bank account details, as with normal remittance solutions.” according to the MAS.
MAS Managing Director Ravi Menon said the “pioneering” system could be expanded “into a network of linked retail payment systems across ASEAN,” referring to the Association of South-East Asian Nations, a 10-country bloc.
Thailand’s Central Bank Governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput said the new system “will effectively address customers’ long standing pain points in the area of cross-border transfers and remittances including long transaction times and high costs.”
Unlike with conventional remittance services, transfers will be completed “within a matter of minutes,” the MAS said.
Singapore hosts over 1 million foreign workers, including thousands of Thais, who remit chunks of their salaries to support families back home. Thailand is in turn a magnet for millions of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.
GNA