Interbank funds transfer to be open to e-wallets
Mr Ong Ye Kung, a board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Minister for Education, said opening up the Fast and Secure Transfer (Fast) service will “bring greater convenience to consumers”.
SINGAPORE — Fast, an instant online interbank funds transfer system, will be open to non-bank players such as Grab and Razer to allow consumers to transfer funds to and from any e-wallet.
Announcing the move at the launch of the unified Quick Response (QR) payment label SGQR on Monday (Sept 17), Mr Ong Ye Kung, a board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Minister for Education, said opening up the Fast and Secure Transfer (Fast) service will “bring greater convenience to consumers”.
Even with the steps that Singapore has undertaken to build up its e-payment infrastructure, including Monday’s launch of SGQR, Mr Ong said Singapore’s national cashless system is not “totally open and accessible yet”.
Citing the example of the Active Wallet payment app issued by Sports Singapore which the public uses to book ActiveSG sports facilities, he said there are limited methods currently to top up the e-wallet.
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Consumers can top up using their debit or credit cards, in person at any ActiveSG Sports Centre, or link it with their POSB or DBS bank account.
But by allowing this e-wallet to access Fast, consumers top up and get refund their e-wallets from any bank instantly, without worrying if their individual banks have enabled the bank account top-up feature.
“In the past, two persons must be using the same e-wallet in order to send money to one another. In future, they can send money across different types of e-wallets, so long as they are all connected to Fast,” Mr Ong said.
NEXT PIECE IN NATIONAL E-PAYMENTS INFRASTRUCTURE
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The United Kingdom and India are forerunners in opening up their central payment infrastructure to non-banks; Malaysia and Hong Kong are following suit in months to come.
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A Direct Fast industry working group, comprising Fast operator, banks, non-banks and MAS, will be formed to develop business and technical requirements for non-banks to connect to Fast.
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Non-bank players that have signed up include Grab, Liquid Group, MatchMove, Razer and Transferwise.
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The working group will seek expressions of interest to build and operate a Fast aggregator, which will help lower costs by aggregating technical requirements across a number of players.
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The aggregator should be independent, provide open access, and be interoperable with the existing Fast infrastructure and other players.
REGULATIONS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS
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Transparent and easily understood regulations to protect consumers, which give “sufficient peace of mind” to all parties is the “last piece of jigsaw” underpinning Singapore’s push to build a cashless system, said Mr Ong.
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Protection guidelines for e-payments will be issued in full at the end of September.
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One of the guidelines stipulates that financial institutions are expected to provide timely payment transaction notification to users.
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Another guideline spells out that financial institutions will bear the entire loss in cases of unauthorised transactions for which consumers are proven not to be negligent. For third-party unauthorised transactions less than S$1,000, financial institutions will have to bear the costs. For such transactions above S$1,000, the financial institution will have to investigate the case further and decide on a case-by-case basis.
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