OCBC now offers cross-border P2P payments via Visa Direct

Singaporean bank OCBC is now offering a new kind of instant transfer to WeChat Pay and Alipay in China. The feature is available to customers of the Singapore-based bank after it signed a new partnership with US payment giant Visa to bring OCBC into the Visa Direct network.

FACTS

• Visa and OCBC took advantage of the Singapore FinTech Festival to unveil their new collaboration and its implementation. It takes the form of a partnership designed to facilitate money transfers for OCBC customers.

• OCBC's application will now integrate Visa Direct to facilitate instant transfers between individuals, and more specifically, between OCBC customers and users of the WeChat Pay and Alipay services in the first instance (capitalizing between them on almost a billion users).

• To send funds, OCBC customers will simply need to enter their recipient's Chinese national ID and cell phone number.

• These transfers take just a few seconds, compared with 2 to 5 days for traditional methods. In terms of amounts, customers will be able to send up to CNY 50,000 per day and CNY 300,000 per year.

• OCBC plans to expand this service by 2026 to include more than 50 digital wallets used across other countries, including popular local services such as GoPay and Ovo in Indonesia, and GCash, PayMaya and Coins in the Philippines.

CHALLENGES

• Speeding up cross-border money transfers in Asia-Pacific: The launch of this new service is aimed above all at speeding up cross-border money transfers in the region, as the two partners emphasize. A necessity according to a study carried out by Visa in Singapore, which states that almost 50% of Chinese respondents have already received money in their digital wallet from abroad.

• A first in Asia: The new partnership between OCBC and Visa makes OCBC's mobile banking application the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region to offer this capability. OCBC's objective is clearly stated: to establish itself as the benchmark application for cross-border transactions in China and Asia.

• Capitalizing on a major partner : Visa Direct boasts nearly 8.5 billion endpoints connected, including 3 billion cards and 3 billion bank accounts (the rest being virtual wallets).

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• This tie-up between Visa and OCBC is not a first. The Asian bank and the U.S. payment giant had already exploited the Visa Commercial Pay mobile solution as part of its inaugural virtual purchasing card offering in October 2021.

• Today, on the other hand, both partners are aiming high to establish themselves as benchmarks for cross-border payments between private individuals in Asia.