OCBC Bank and Republic Polytechnic (RP) have enabled students of the education institution and their parents to pay school fees via PayNow by scanning a quick-response (QR) code on the student portal with their mobile phones. OCBC Bank is RP’s main bank.
The polytechnic is the first education institution to adopt funds transfer service PayNow by leveraging OCBC Bank’s Application Programming Interface (API).
The bank’s API enables students and their parents to pay from bank accounts with any of the nine PayNow participating banks to RP.
Currently, close to 60% of RP’s students do not pay their school fees via GIRO.
OCBC Bank and RP will explore extending the use of PayNow for the collection of other fees in the future. This could include fees for hostels, overseas trips and facility bookings.
Said Mr. Melvyn Low, Head, Global Transaction Banking, OCBC Bank, “We are pleased to be able to support Republic Polytechnic in their adoption of PayNow, which not only benefits students and their parents, but also the organisation. PayNow is becoming an increasingly popular choice for payments and collections among consumers and organisations for the ease and convenience it brings. The cost savings that arise from the reduction of cash and cheque handling is another attractive value proposition for forward-thinking organisations like Republic Polytechnic.”
Singaporean consumers’ rapid adoption of PayNow bodes well for the take-up of this solution. In June 2018 at the 45th Annual Dinner of The Association of Banks in Singapore, Minister for Education and MAS’ Board Member Ong Ye Kung shared that there were already more than 1.4 million PayNow registrations, and nearly $900 million had been transferred via PayNow since its launch in 2017.
Said Ms Geraldine Ang, Chief Financial Officer, Republic Polytechnic, “We are pleased be one of the pioneer agencies to adopt the use of PayNow Corporate as an e-payments solution. It provides our stakeholders and corporate partners with a convenient and secure platform to transact instantaneously with the institution, as part of our digitalisation effort and push towards becoming a Smart Nation.”
This PayNow collaboration builds on OCBC Bank’s previous experiences with CPF Board. Using the same API, OCBC Bank worked with CPF Board to successfully introduce PayNow in March 2018 for withdrawals by CPF members aged 55 and above - the first government-to-consumer use of PayNow. In just over 3 months since this option was introduced, some 4,000 withdrawals, totalling over $40 million, had been made through PayNow.
OCBC Bank’s API Journey
This collaboration with CPF Board was facilitated by OCBC Bank’s transactional API.
OCBC was the first bank in Southeast Asia to launch an open API platform, in May 2016. To date, more than 200 APIs developed by an in-house team are housed on an open API platform, Connect2OCBC.
In September 2017, OCBC Bank became the first bank to roll out a transactional GIRO API that allows a GIRO facility to be set up instantly when integrated with a third-party website or app. IRAS was the first to use this, and in November 2017, OCBC customers became the first in Singapore to be able to instantly set up a GIRO facility for tax payment via IRAS’ myTax Portal.