OCBC Bank has announced that its customers will now be able to ‘scan and pay’ at Alipay Plus (Alipay+)-accepting merchants across Malaysia, South Korea and Mainland China using the OCBC Digital app – and, as such, will become the first Singapore bank to support Alipay+’s QR code-enabled payments.

Under the partnership, OCBC customers will be able to pay at tens of millions of merchant stores within the Alipay+ global ecosystem, with payments made directly from their OCBC Singapore bank accounts (with additional third-party apps not required).

Introduced by China’s Ant Group in 2020, Alipay+ is an SME-targeted payments solution enabling merchants to accept digital, cross-border payments from e-wallets, bank apps and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) apps.

The exchange rate applied is offered by Alipay+. OCBC boasts that the rate is “competitive and can be seen in real-time, with no additional fees and charges”.

OCBC notes that the feature will be particularly welcomed by OCBC Singapore customers travelling to Mainland China, “where merchants have largely adopted cashless solutions and e-wallet payments – such as Alipay – are widely accepted across the country”, it said.

“In Mainland China, Alipay is used for almost everything, from being able to hail a taxi to paying for meals and coffees to shopping online from a myriad of Chinese e-commerce stores.”

By the end of the year, OCBC said the feature will be progressively rolled out for use in other markets, including Japan, Hong Kong SAR and Macao SAR, where Alipay+ is widely used.

The service has a daily transaction limit of S$1,000.

Customers are also able to the exchange rate on their OCBC Digital apps before they confirm their transactions.

Payments can be initiated by two methods: by customers either scanning the merchant’s QR code to initiate a transaction (known as the merchant-presented mode), or by having their QR codes (displayed in the app) scanned by the merchants (customer-presented mode).

The Alipay+ partnership is OCBC’s latest cross-border scan and pay service collaboration, following partnerships with Malaysia’s DuitNow QR and Thailand’s PromptPay QR – all within the last year.

Alipay is the world’s largest mobile or digital payments platform, reaching more than 1.4 billion consumers globally.

More than 80 million merchants globally accept Alipay as a payment method in their stores.