Singapore-based Stripe users can now accept payments via PayNow

SINGAPORE-BASED businesses using Stripe can now accept local electronic fund transfer service PayNow across its suite of solutions, the global payments processing firm said on Wednesday (Apr 20).

Stripe users based outside Singapore can also accept PayNow if they create a Singapore Stripe account. This move is expected to bring PayNow another step closer to international acceptance.

For a perspective of scale, nearly 70 per cent of Singaporean adults have made a purchase via Stripe since 2017. Stripe said there are "thousands" of Singapore-based merchants using its platform, but declined to give the exact number.

Online furniture retailer HipVan and job portal JobStreet are among the first local businesses offering PayNow through Stripe.

Prior to this, many businesses have had to manage PayNow transactions manually. This means spending hours tracking each transaction and processing refunds.

At the end of each month, merchants had to check off each PayNow transaction on their bank statement to verify that the payment was processed and received correctly.

With the integration with Stripe, businesses can now generate dynamic QR codes for each transaction, thus reducing manual-input errors. Incoming transfers will be automatically reconciled with transactions. Merchants will also be notified instantly when a payment successfully goes through.

Refunds can be processed automatically from the dashboard with one click.

Merchants here who use Stripe can now also offer their customers the option to pay for subscriptions using PayNow which, prior to this, was not typically used for recurring payments.

Sarita Singh, Stripe’s revenue and growth lead for South-east Asia, said the previous convention of managing PayNow transactions manually works for “a handful of customers and several dozen transactions”, but is untenable for rapidly scaling businesses.

“For example, businesses will need to spend extra time to sort out overpayment or underpayment as current systems often provide a static QR-code for each business, requiring the customer to manually input the payment amount,” she said.

“When your ambition is to rapidly scale for hundreds of thousands of customers with exponentially more transactions, the manual overhead costs skyrocket into something untenable,” she said.

PayNow was launched in 2017 and now has some 4.9 million registered users in Singapore. In addition to PayNow, Stripe is also integrated with various other payment methods, including digital wallets like GrabPay and AliPay, credit and debit cards and buy-now-pay-later platforms.