Singapore payment methods: Why you need a PayNow API

PayNow is an account-to-account payment system owned and developed by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS). 

With PayNow, customers can pay for any Singaporean mobile number by scanning a PayNow QR code or a national identity card. 

If you've clicked on this article, you may want to understand PayNow or want a simple way to add PayNow to your payment stack.

But you might have a few questions: 

• Is PayNow actually worth adding? 
• What other payment methods are essential when selling online in Singapore?
• Should I use a payment gateway or payment orchestration to add PayNow?
  ‍

This article will answer all of the above. We’ll walk you through the importance of PayNow payments in Singapore, give you an overview of the payment landscape, and introduce you to a better way to integrate new payment methods into your payment stack.

Looking for a solution to integrate with new payment methods in just a few clicks? Book a call with the Primer team to find out more. 

Why you need to start accepting PayNow payments in Singapore

Image source: https://abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/pay-now
‍
The Singaporean government actively promotes and uses PayNow, and as of 2022, more than half of Singapore’s population, or over 5 million people, were using the service. By the end of 2026, Singapore plans to stop processing corporate checks and convert all customers to digital banking apps that rely on PayNow.

PayNow is now the preferred payment method for 68% of Gen Z consumers in Singapore. PayNow is also linked to national payment gateways in India (UPI), Malaysia (DuitNow), and Thailand (PromptPay), allowing for more manageable cross-border payments. 

In Singapore, cart abandonment rates were as high as 82.6% for ecommerce. Making sure your business offers PayNow is crucial to help combat cart abandonment. In general, studies have shown that providing local payment methods can lower cart abandonment rates by as much as 32%.

What other Singapore payment methods are worth offering? 

While PayNow is a dominant force in Singapore’s digital payment ecosystem, merchants looking to optimize their checkout page experience should consider offering additional local payment methods. 

Of course, debit and credit card payments remain ubiquitous in Singapore, and being able to process Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards goes without saying..

But what other alternative payment methods are worth considering adding to your payment stack?

Here are a few of the most popular payment methods in Singapore: 

• NETS (Network for Electronic Transfers): One of Singapore's most widely used digital payment methods, with over 130,000 acceptance points and about 10 million active NETS cards nationwide. It supports contactless, QR code, and online payments, making it a versatile option for merchants.
  
• GrabPay: As part of the Grab super app, GrabPay leads Singapore’s e-wallet market, holding a market share of approximately 35.3% in 2020. Consumers frequently use it for food delivery, ride-hailing, and in-store purchases, attracted by its rewards and promotional incentives.
  
• FavePay: Widely used for QR code-based payments, FavePay has a regional user base exceeding 6 million consumers and partnerships with over 40,000 merchants, facilitating savings of over USD 400 million through cashback rewards.
  
• DBS PayLah!: One of Singapore’s top mobile wallets, DBS PayLah! reported over 1.8 million users in 2021.
  
• AliPay and WeChat Pay: Given Singapore’s strong tourism and business connections with China, offering AliPay and WeChat Pay is essential, especially considering AliPay's global user base of 1.43 billion and WeChat Pay’s 1.34 billion users worldwide.
  
• Mobile payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay: These mobile wallet solutions are widely supported by banks and financial institutions in Singapore and across the world. Their usage is steadily increasing for both online and in-person contactless payments.
  
• Atome (Buy Now, Pay Later): The BNPL market in Singapore has seen rapid growth, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.3%, with Atome leading the market by offering flexible, interest-free installment payments (GlobeNewswire, 2024).

Curious about payment trends across the APAC region? Read more: A guide to alternative payment methods in Asia Pacific

How to integrate with PayNow using an API 

The most straightforward way to offer new payment methods is either using a payment gateway or a payment orchestrator.

Here’s how they stack up: 

Option 1: Using a Payment Gateway

A payment gateway securely captures, encrypts, and transmits payment data between customers, merchants, and banks to authorize online transactions.

Here’s what’s typically involved on the merchant’s end:

• Register with a payment gateway that supports PayNow.
• Create and configure your merchant account.
• Integrate your site or app using the gateway’s APIs or SDK.
• Activate PayNow within the gateway’s dashboard.
• Continuously monitor and maintain integration performance.

Option 2: Using Primer for Payment Orchestration

Payment orchestration simplifies payments even further than integrating with a payment gateway directly. 

Orchestration works by unifying multiple payment providers, payment gateways, and methods into a single API integration, eliminating the need to build and maintain separate connections for each provider. 

To illustrate, let us introduce you to Primer.
Primer is a unified payment infrastructure that makes adding new payment methods like PayNow straightforward. Here’s what you need to do: 

• Enable PayNow in your dashboard (no code required).
• Use Universal Checkout to toggle payment methods on and off. You can also re-order payments and create conditions to determine which payment methods to display, based on the customer’s currency, country, transaction amount, and other metadata.

That’s all it takes to start accepting payments via PayNow, or any other payment method you choose.

Read more about how to set up Universal Checkout in Primer Docs

Future-proof your payments stack

Relying solely on a payment gateway means introducing additional payment methods requiring additional integrations, increased development effort, and ongoing maintenance.

Additionally, the gateway you currently use might not support all of the payment options your customers expect. As such, you’ll need to integrate with more gateways, which will quickly add to a complex and fragmented payment infrastructure.

For example, suppose you decide you’d like to add AliPay and Apple Pay to your payment stack. In that case, you might need to integrate each method separately or switch to a different payment gateway altogether. 

In contrast, Primer ensures that:

• You won't need new technical integrations or additional engineering resources.
• You can instantly activate new payment methods, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or AliPay, directly from your dashboard.
• Your business remains agile and adaptable, allowing you to respond rapidly to market demands and your customers’ ever-changing preferred payment methods, without increasing complexity.
  ‍

Primer enables you to seamlessly scale your payment methods, ensuring your business stays flexible, competitive, and ready for future growth.

Primer: manage all of your payment processes through one platform 

Now that you have PayNow ready to use in your payment stack, you can explore how Primer can help optimize your payment stack.

If you choose us, here are just a few tools you can start using from day one to start optimizing your payments: 

• Set up payment routing without any code using Workflows: Using drag and drop logic, Workflows enables you to set routing conditions based on your business priority, such as the most reliable or cost-effective processor. You can also use payment routing to set up other automations, like running fraud checks for specific locations, card types, or amounts. 

‍

• Set up Fallbacks: This tool helps you rescue otherwise lost revenue. Fallbacks automatically reroute any soft declined payment to a backup processor. This is how Primer customer Banxa recovered 20% of lost transactions with just a few clicks. 
  
  And because our Primer 3DS solution is processor agnostic, your customers won’t have to go through another check when a payment is rerouted. This makes your payment retries truly frictionless for the customer and reduces the chance of cart abandonment.
  ‍

• Analyze your payment data in Observability: Primer enables you to see all PSP data in one place, without having to access separate dashboards. With over 100 visualizations and more than 30 filters, Observability enables you to spot key trends to inform your payment strategy.
  
  With Monitors, you can get a notification whenever a particular metric (that you’ve set up to follow) hits a certain point. We can let you know by webhook, email, or even Slack. 

How Pelago is simplifying and optimizing payments with Primer

Pelago, a travel experiences platform owned by Singapore Airlines Group, offers 200,000+ products across more than 150 countries. Their mission extends beyond simple booking—they aim to connect travelers with global and local cultures, particularly in Singapore Airlines destinations. 

The payment challenge

In its Singapore-focused early days, Pelago operated efficiently with a single global payment processor. However, as the company expanded throughout the fragmented APAC region, limitations became apparent:

• Couldn't support region-specific Alternative Payment Methods (APMs)
• Faced growing complexity with each new payment processor integration
• Had limited resources to manage multiple direct PSP relationships
  ‍

"We asked: How can we scale our payment stack without taking on all this additional complexity?" explains Altaf Dhamani, Pelago's Chief Product Officer.

The Primer solution

Primer serves as an infrastructure layer, connecting Pelago to multiple payment services without the burden of direct integrations. And with our Universal Checkout, Pelago has moved beyond a static payment approach to a dynamic strategy that considers customer preferences, conversion rates, and processing costs.

In Singapore, for example, this means strategically positioning PayNow at checkout—a method that local customers prefer and that costs Pelago less per transaction than credit cards. This creates a win-win that both improves conversion and optimizes expenses.

Looking ahead, Pelago plans to leverage more Primer capabilities, including:

• Intelligent payment routing to the best-performing PSP based on factors like currency
• Using Fallbacks to recover failed payments
• Implementing tokenization and reconciliation to further reduce complexity
  ‍

"Primer allows us to dynamically adapt our checkout process to suit our customers' preferences and our business strategy, leading to a more efficient payment experience," concludes Dhamani.

Read the full case study here: Pelago creates new horizons for travel and payments with Primer.

Add PayNow and other payment methods faster with Primer

Integrating with new, alternative, and local payment methods like PayNow becomes crucial as you scale. But managing integration, regulatory requirements, monitoring, and maintenance can pull resources from your core business needs.

With Primer, you only have to integrate once to unlock all of the providers and payment methods you need to scale.

Book a call to integrate with PayNow—and all your other payment services—the simpler way.