Over the past decade, the payments space has grown exponentially. With rapid technological developments, merchants can now choose from accepting mobile payments, contactless cards and digital wallets. 

While the take-up of such technologies has varied across different countries over the years, the Covid-19 pandemic has driven a significant increase in digital payments, data from the World Bank shows. In its June 29 report, the bank found that two-thirds of adults worldwide now make or receive a digital payment, with the share in developing economies growing from 35% to 57% in 2021. 

Driven by this digital revolution, merchants in Singapore — which includes micro, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) — have embarked on their digital transformation to accept more forms of payment, says Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) group CEO Lawrence Chan. “As digital payments become commonplace, the emphasis has shifted to the user experience. How can we improve the user experience, allowing more transactions to occur so that adoption can be accelerated?” 

Growing demand for touch-free experiences has also led to the broader acceptance of QR (“quick response”) payments. According to a report by Mastercard, QR codes have gained solid traction in the Asia Pacific compared to the rest of the world. Of those who used QR codes for payment, 63% said they used them more frequently in the last year than in the past. 

This echoes Chan’s observation that NETS has seen a significant increase in the adoption of QR among its merchants. “One silver lining of the pandemic is that scanning QR codes became the norm; this made it easier to drive consumer education around QR payments.” 

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NETS can also play a role in digital payments adoption to the long-tail business, including the country’s hawkers. QR payments have proven to be the right merchant solution for hawkers as payment acceptance can occur without the hawker needing to touch any device to focus on serving their customers. “To enhance the usability for hawkers, the firm has enhanced the functionalities of the merchant digital payment app, for instance, a louder notification for a successful transaction to give feedback that payment is good, so that the hawker does not need to look at the screen. “This is an example of how we seamlessly facilitated the movement of payment credentials for even the smallest ticket transactions, benefitting our sellers and consumers,” says Chan. 

NETS is one of the players that supported Enterprise Singapore and Infocomm Media Development Authority’s effort to help hawkers go digital, encouraging the adoption of the unified e-payment solution SGQR. 

Cross-border expansion 

NETS also focuses on increasing its cross-border capabilities, making payments more frictionless for travellers. 

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Before the pandemic, Chan says that NETS had already enabled cross-border payments in Malaysia through NETS cards. It has continued to work towards enabling more cross-border payments. In August, NETS announced a collaboration with National ITMX, Thailand’s interbank payment infrastructure and central data processing system. Through the partnership, Singaporean residents using local banking apps DBS PayLah! and OCBC Pay Anyone will be able to scan Thailand’s national PromptPay QR to make payments at over eight million retail acceptance points. UOB TMRW users will be able to do so from next year. 

“Another key partner is UnionPay International. When travelling, Singapore residents can enjoy digital payment at all UPI QR merchants internationally,” says Chan, adding that the firm is establishing more bilateral corridors. 

Cross-border payments are not the only area where NETS plans to strengthen its foothold. It is also strengthening its offerings in the e-commerce space as its merchants increasingly look for omnichannel solutions, selling and accepting payments on different platforms and devices. 

The firm is working with several growing merchants to provide a card-on-file (COF) service, allowing consumers to make in-app payments by tokenising their NETS bank ATM card. This payment solution allows users to authorise merchants to store their payment information securely and charge the stored accounts for future purchases. Users no longer have to input their card numbers for the payment of their subsequent ComfortDelGro rides, for instance. 

“We will continue to invest in the COF online solution and allow merchants to sell to NETS consumers via in-app, online, face-to-face or in any omnichannel combination,” says Chan. 

Data-driven insights 

NETS was one of Singapore’s pioneers of cashless payment systems. Since its establishment in 1985, NETS has built a leading position in the payments space, with an extensive product suite across merchant and consumer ecosystems. Its Unified Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal, for instance, allows merchants to accept both NETS and international payment schemes via card-based or mobile payments. 

In its 30 years, NETS has a vast network of over 120,000 acceptance points, serving as solid data points for customer spending behaviour. These data points can then be extrapolated as data-driven insights that can help merchants make better business decisions, explains Chan. 

As British mathematician and data scientist Clive Humby once said, data is the new oil. Data holds tremendous value for different sectors and industries but is worthless if left unrefined. Humby and his wife Edwina Dunn helped British supermarket chain Tesco spearhead its loyalty card programme, analysing the data collected to work out its customers’ spending patterns — which eventually led the supermarket chain to double its market share in over a year. 

This is the value that NETS is hoping to bring to its merchants by providing them with data-driven insights. When the data is compared against industry benchmarks, NETS merchants can understand their strengths and gaps, leading to data-based decisions for their marketing campaigns. “We are currently piloting this solution with several merchants,” says Chan. 

As a veteran in the payments industry with over two decades of experience with growth acceleration and business transformation, Chan understands how important data can be. And as businesses in Singapore continue their digital transformation journey, NETS saw a growing role in this regard through its guiding principle purpose statement, “Connecting Communities, Empowering Lives”. 

“We want to offer more value to our merchants by offering relevant solutions as much as possible.”