OCBC has used Visa Direct to become the first mobile banking app in Asia Pacific to let customers send near-instant peer-to-peer transfers to both Weixin Pay (WeChat Pay) and Alipay using just the recipient’s China national identification name and China mobile number.
Weixin Pay and Alipay are the two most dominant digital wallets in China with over a billion users, making up 90 per cent of all digital payments in the country.
OCBC’s pay-to-wallet service performs the transfer of monies within seconds. This improves on the current average of two to five days using other account-to-account or non-bank remittance services. In addition, it eliminates the need to physically carry cash to non-bank remittance companies to make a cross-border funds transfer.
The bank plans to expand the service to more than 50 digital wallets over the next two years, tapping the most popular in-country wallets like GoPay and Ovo in Indonesia, and GCash, PayMaya and Coins in the Philippines.
Sunny Quek, OCBC’s head of global consumer financial services, says: “We’re starting with access to the two biggest digital wallets in China - Weixin Pay and Alipay - but will quickly be expanding our services by adding more wallets to our digital payment capabilities. There is urgency to do so given the increasing cross-border needs of our customers.
“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.”
Funds transfers are made directly from OCBC customers’ Singapore bank accounts. There is a daily and per transaction transfer limit of CNY50,000 and annual transaction limit of CNY300,000 for OCBC Singapore customers to the wallet recipients.