OCBC has become the first mobile banking app in the Asia Pacific to utilize Visa Direct, allowing customers to send near-instant peer-to-peer transfers to Weixin Pay (WeChat Pay) and Alipay using only the recipient’s China national identification name and mobile number.
Weixin Pay and Alipay are the two leading digital wallets in China, boasting over a billion users and accounting for 90% of the country’s digital payments. OCBC’s pay-to-wallet service facilitates money transfers in seconds, significantly faster than the typical two to five days required by other account-to-account or non-bank remittance services. This innovation also eliminates the need to physically transport cash to non-bank remittance companies for cross-border transactions.
The bank aims to expand this service to over 50 digital wallets in the next two years, targeting popular in-country wallets such as GoPay and Ovo in Indonesia, as well as GCash, PayMaya, and Coins in the Philippines.
Sunny Quek, OCBC’s head of global consumer financial services, stated, “We’re starting with access to the two biggest digital wallets in China – Weixin Pay and Alipay – but will quickly expand 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 broader goal is to become the go-to app for cross-border transactions in Greater China, ASEAN, and even globally. Customers can already scan and pay merchants worldwide using their OCBC app. With the launch 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, with a daily and per transaction transfer limit of CNY 50,000 and an annual transaction limit of CNY 300,000 for OCBC Singapore customers to the wallet recipients.