Driving adoption of real-time payments in Asean

THE adoption of digital payments has been particularly rapid in Asean due to the region's young and highly-connected population. In the 2019 Citi and Imperial College's Digital Money Index, which tracks 84 countries and their digital money readiness, we saw five out of six Asean countries move up the ranks in the five years between 2014 and 2019. Reflecting this trend, South-east Asia's Internet economy has more than tripled in size over the last four years, according to the e-Conomy South-east Asia 2019 report by Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain.

Governments in Asean have been fast transforming their payments systems. Indeed, seven of the grouping's 10 countries have already rolled out sophisticated real-time instant payments systems, in addition to upgrading their core payment infrastructure.

For instance, the Singapore government introduced PayNow in 2017. A year later, an enhancement to the platform, PayNow Corporate, was introduced to allow businesses and government agencies to pay and receive funds instantaneously using a Unique Entity Number (UEN).