The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will establish a “Payments Council”, a move designed to facilitate the vision of an e-payments ecosystem in Singapore. This includes the development of seamless payments solutions like PayNow, supporting the introduction and rollout of unified point-of-sale terminals at merchants, and introducing new payments legislation to safeguard consumer interests and facilitate innovative payment solutions.
The Payments Council will comprise 20 leaders from banks, payment service providers, businesses, and trade associations. The Payments Council will bring together both the providers and users of payment services in Singapore. It will also encourage collaboration within the payments industry, promote interoperability among e-payments solutions, develop strategies to drive the pervasive adoption of e-payments, and advise and make recommendations to MAS on payments related policies.
Chaired by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of MAS, the regulator also released a summary of responses regarding a public consultation on payments. Most respondents welcomed the formation of a Payments Council as an industry coordination body.
“We have many good e-payment solutions in Singapore. We need to make them more inter-operable and better integrate them with individual and business use cases so that more people will adopt e-payments. The Payments Council brings together the various parties that can help achieve this. Our mission is to make e-payments simple, seamless, and secure for all Singaporeans,” commented Menon.
The list of Payment Council Members is below.
- Chairman Ravi Menon Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore
- Banks
- Amol Gupte Head of ASEAN (Citi Country Officer), Singapore, Citibank
- Piyush Gupta CEO, DBS Bank Ltd
- Samuel Tsien CEO, OCBC Bank Ltd
- Judy Hsu CEO, Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore) Ltd
- Wee Ee Cheong CEO, United Overseas Bank Ltd
- Payment service providers
- Deborah Heng General Manager (Singapore), Mastercard
- Jeffrey Goh CEO, NETS Pte Ltd
- Rohan Mahadevan APAC CEO, PayPal Pte Ltd
- Ooi Huey Tyng Country Manager (Singapore and Brunei), Visa Worldwide Pte Ltd
- Businesses
- Anthony Tan Group CEO, Grab
- Alexis Lanternier CEO, Lazada Singapore
- Nick Nash Group President, Sea Pte Ltd
- Lim Hock Chee CEO, Sheng Siong Group Ltd
- Robert Yap Executive Chairman, YCH Group
- Trade associations
- Kurt Wee President, Association of Small and Medium Enterprises
- Yeo Hiang Meng President, Federation of Merchant Associations
- Vincent Tan President, Restaurant Association of Singapore
- Ho Meng Kit CEO, Singapore Business Federation
- R Dhinakaran President, Singapore Retailers Association Singapore Clearing House Association (SCHA)
- Ng Nam Sin Chairman, SCHA