SINGAPORE – The enhanced Singapore Quick Response Code Scheme (SGQR+) is going further, with local and overseas merchants standing to gain from the improvements.
Local payment services group Nets is rolling out the commercialisation of SGQR+ in Singapore, while Singapore-headquartered fintech Liquid Group looks to take SGQR+ global with the launch of roamQR on Nov 7.
Under SGQR+, merchants receiving customer payments through QR codes need to deal with only one issuer, which is Nets.
Through Nets, merchants can then access 17 other local and international payment schemes such as DBS PayLah, OCBC Digital, UOB TMRW, Alipay and PromptPay.
Before SGQR+, merchants who wanted to accept a range of payment schemes had to deal with the different financial institutions themselves. The acceptance of payment schemes was also not uniform across merchants.
SGQR+ will be rolled out islandwide to 24,000 acceptance points or static QR points displayed at retail and food and beverage (F&B) outlets.
The enhanced payment scheme will also be extended to the hawker segment, which is separate from retail and F&B categories.
This means SGQR+ will be available to more than 35,000 acceptance points in Singapore.
In the SGQR+ proof-of-concept conducted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in November 2023, 75 per cent of participating merchants indicated an interest in continuing participation in the scheme, while 86 per cent of financial institutions indicated a positive user experience.
The proof-of-concept comes after MAS in 2018 introduced SGQR to combine multiple payment QR codes into a single SGQR label. This was to make it easy for merchants to accept payments digitally.
In a release issued on Nov 7, Nets said it aims to grow the number of acceptance points by 10 per cent year on year.
Mr Lawrence Chan, group chief executive of Nets, said
