The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Association of Banks (ABS) will be exploring four areas of enhancements to Singapore’s national instant payments infrastructure as part of a PayNow Generation 2 (PayNow Gen2) study.
“PayNow has been a remarkable success story. It has grown into a widely adopted and trusted real-time payment platform in Singapore. As of December 2025, there were more than 11 million PayNow proxy registrations,” says Tan Teck Long, group CEO of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) and chairman of ABS.
The four areas, which were identified through consultations with 37 organisations and benchmarking against 11 jurisdictions Australia, China, the UK, Malaysia and Thailand, include improving interoperability between PayNow and NETS’ QR codes where consumers can scan and pay at any merchant regardless of which payment scheme they’re on.
Users will also be able to make payments in a more seamless manner through deep-linking within PayNow QR codes. This reduces the number of payment steps, making online payments smoother. MAS and ABS will look to have this ready within a year.
