KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 20 — You can now perform instant fund transfers to someone in Singapore and vice versa through participating Malaysian and Singaporean financial institutions. This was made possible through the linkage of Malaysia’s DuitNow and Singapore PayNow real-time payment system.

Malaysia and Singapore residents can transfer up to RM3,000 or SGD1,000 (~RM3,476) daily through this feature. All you need to do to perform the transaction is the recipient’s mobile number or Virtual Payment Address.

Originally announced in September 2021, the linkage also includes the implementation of cross-border QR payment. However, this capability was rolled out ahead of the person-to-person (P2P) fund transfers back in March.

Participating financial institutions

For starters, P2P fund transfers are only available through Maybank, CIMB, and Touch ‘n Go (TNG) eWallet for users in Malaysia. Do not that TNG eWallet users can only perform fund transfers from Malaysia to Singapore for the time being while the feature to receive funds from Singapore will only be available next month.

Over in Singapore, this feature is available to customers of Liquid Group, Maybank Singapore, OCBC, and UOB. However, these financial institutions are enabling it in stages and will increase the amount of "eligible users” by batches until the end of January.

Meanwhile, Malaysia’s Hong Leong Bank and Singapore’s DBS will also offer this service soon. However, the exact availability date was not revealed in the official announcement.

Customers may have to pay a certain fee to perform instant cross-border fund transfers to Singapore, although this might differ from one financial institution to another. For example, Maybank is currently waiving the service charge to utilise this feature which the bank called the DuitNow Overseas Transfer. — SoyaCincau