Singaporean bank OCBC’s app, enabled by Visa Direct, has become the first mobile banking app in Asia-Pacific to let customers send near-instant peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers to both Weixin Pay (WeChat Pay) and Alipay using just the recipient’s China national identification name and China mobile number.
The bank’s pay-to-wallet service incurs no transfer fees. Weixin Pay and Alipay are the two most dominant digital wallets in China with over a billion users, making up 90% of all digital payments in the country.
The expansion of the bank’s remittance capabilities is timely, it notes, as money flows from Singapore to China continue to grow, and more individuals relocate from China to Singapore to live and work, and continue to remit funds home. The bank has seen a 50% jump in its Singapore customers’ remittances to China from a year ago.
The pay-to-wallet service performs the transfer of monies within seconds, which represents a significant improvement on the current average of two to five days using other account-to-account or non-bank remittance services. In addition, the service eliminates the need to physically carry cash to non-bank remittance companies to make a cross-border funds transfer.
As well, more than 50 digital wallets are to be added in two years as the bank will continue to work with Visa Direct so that by 2026, the most popular in-country digital wallets like GoPay and Ovo in Indonesia, and GCash, PayMaya and Coins in the Philippines, will be able to receive funds from the bank’s Singapore bank accounts almost instantly and at competitive exchange rates.
In total, the OCBC app will have access to more than 50 digital wallets, providing the most comprehensive digital wallet access of any banking app in Asia-Pacific.
This will meet the rising demand of the bank’s customers, whose monthly cross-border fund transfers from Singapore to other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) markets have increased an average of 10% from a year ago.
“Our wider goal is to become the go-to app for cross-border transactions in Greater China, Asean and even globally,” adds Sunny Quek, the bank’s head of global consumer financial services. “With the roll out of our P2P pay-to-wallet service, we are well on our way to achieving this goal.”
