OCBC Bank has launched a new service allowing customers to send money instantly to users of WeChat Pay and Alipay in China.
This makes OCBC the first bank in the Asia Pacific region to offer this capability.
The service, available through the OCBC mobile banking app, uses Visa Direct to facilitate these peer-to-peer transfers, which now take mere seconds compared to the previous 2-5 days needed for traditional methods.
This launch comes at a time when OCBC has seen a 50% surge in remittances from Singapore to China, fueled by a growing number of individuals relocating from China to Singapore who need to send money home.
Customers can send up to CNY 50,000 per day and CNY 300,000 per year using only the recipient’s China national identification name and mobile number. The service is free of charge.
This new service builds upon OCBC’s existing global scan-and-pay functionality.
OCBC plans to expand this service by 2026 to include over 50 digital wallets in other countries, including popular options like GoPay and Ovo in Indonesia, and GCash, PayMaya and Coins in the Philippines.
This will allow customers to send money to friends and family abroad or even make direct payments to small businesses overseas.
Sunny Quek, OCBC’s Head of Global Consumer Financial Services, said,
“Our wider goal is to become the go-to app for cross-border transactions in Greater China, ASEAN and even globally.
Our customers can already scan and pay merchants globally using their OCBC app. With the roll out of our peer-to-peer pay-to-wallet service today, we are well on our way to achieving this goal.”
Adeline Kim, Visa Country Manager for Singapore & Brunei, said,
“Our Green Shoots Radar research showed that close to 50 per cent of Chinese have received money in their digital wallets from overseas, which indicates a need for us to transform the remittance process to make it easier for consumers to send and receive money.
Previously, Singapore residents needed to top up their digital wallets and then make transfers via their digital wallets, which is a two-step process.”
