How cashless mainland China made Hong Kong, Singapore look backward

Hong Kong and the Lion City were early adopters of cashless payments, but now find themselves playing catch-up. In Singapore, a new QR code promises to spare its ministers from feeling like ‘country bumpkins’

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A Singaporean woman pays for her coffee at a cashless cafe. Photo: Reuters

Published: 12:00pm, 6 Oct 2018Updated: 12:04pm, 6 Oct 2018

It’s lunchtime on a Tuesday and a hungry office worker has just pulled up beside Amoy Street Food Centre – a popular haunt in the Central Business District of Singapore. For the next five minutes he fumbles with a parking coupon, tearing tiny holes in the paper to indicate the date and time, as well as the duration he will be parking his car there.

Up till about a year ago, this was a common sight in the 1,100 public car parks across the island, as were tiny round pieces of paper littered on the ground. But on this day, his car was the only one of the 10 along the street bearing coupons.

Parking coupons in Singapore. Photo: Samantha Boh

This tedious fee-paying method is becoming obsolete, as drivers increasingly pay their car park fees electronically through the Parking.sg app.

Like Hong Kong with its Octopus card, Singapore was an early adopter of e-payment systems, starting with the introduction of the General Interbank Recurring Order (GIRO) in 1985, which allowed people to make monthly payments to a billing organisation directly from their bank accounts. But since those early days both cities have found themselves leapfrogged in the race to the cashless society by mainland China’s burgeoning mobile payment scene.

Now, experts say, there are signs Singapore is catching up as it pushes out national initiatives to achieve the cashless society.

The Singapore Government’s goal is to reduce the use of cash, cut ATM withdrawals to just 20 per cent of e-transactions by 2020, and become cheque-free by 2025.

And with the recent launch of a universal QR code, which allows consumers to scan and transfer funds from as many as 27 e-payment apps, the pieces of the jigsaw are slowly coming together.

One issue with Singapore’s initial cashless push was market fragmentation, said Professor Boh Wai Fong, head of the information technology and operations management division at the Nanyang Business School. Unlike in China, where technology giants such as Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, and Tencent dominate the mobile payment scene through their Alipay and WeChat payment platforms, Singapore has too many separate providers, which range from banks to ride-sharing firms, she said.