OCBC Bank has become the first financial institution to bring Google Pay’s peer-to-peer funds transfer service to Singapore.
The move makes Singapore only the third country, after India and the US, where the Google Pay P2P service is available.
OCBC has integrated Google Pay with PayNow, the Singaporean P2P payments service backed by the island's banks.
Customers can download the Google Pay app onto their iOS or Android devices to make instant transfers through PayNow - tapping on funds in their current or savings accounts. Money can be sent to contacts who have linked their bank accounts to their mobile numbers.
Ching Wei Hong, head, global wealth management and consumer banking, OCBC, says: "Singaporeans continue to significantly increase their use of PayNow, with more than 70 million transactions worth S$12.16 billion in 2019. We believe that our partnership with Google Pay will continue to help drive this trend in 2020 and beyond."
Caesar Sengupta, VP of payments and the Next Billion Users initiatives at Google, adds: "It was a pleasure working with the team to design and build Google Pay for Singapore so customers can provision their OCBC Bank accounts and leverage the national rails - via PayNow - for transactions."