Singapore and the Philippines to link real-time payment systems

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the central banks for Singapore and the Philippines respectively,  have agreed to broaden the scope of the financial technology (fintech) collaboration which they entered into in 2017.

Nicholas Hanna of Pinsent Masons MPillay, the Singapore joint law venture between MPillay and Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law, said: “This collaboration with the Philippines further emphasizes Singapore’s active participation in linkages of real-time payment systems with countries in the region, such as Thailand, India and Malaysia, as previously announced.”

“As a regional financial hub, such a move will certainly benefit Singapore as it seeks to enhance and continually transform its payment infrastructure and bring us closer towards establishing a more robust and interoperable network of cross border payment systems in the ASEAN region,” he said.

According to a Business Times report, MAS has also discussed a similar link with Indonesia, which would join existing arrangements with Malaysia, India and Thailand.

In May, MAS and the Bank of Thailand announced that they would link PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay system. The linkage was the first its kind in the world and came after several years of collaboration.

The PayNow-DuitNow linkage between Singapore and Malaysia will be rolled out between September and December 2022. Singapore’s PayNow and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will also be linked by July 2022.