DBS Bank launches mobile wallet
DBS Bank has unveiled its own mobile wallet, called DBS PayLah, which can be downloaded as an app and allows the bank's customers to send and receive funds via their devices.
The mobile wallet has a daily transaction limit of S$999, said Singapore's largest bank in a statement released Thursday. It suggested that the app can be used to provide children's allowance as well as pay for purchases with sole proprietorships such as blogshops and taxi drivers.
DBS noted that while smartphone adoption was at a high 87 percent in the country, consumers had been slow to use mobile devices as a payment mode due to concerns about security, privacy, and user convenience.
The bank had launched another mobile banking app, called mBanking, in 2011 but this also saw slow adoption despite its focus on making user experience "seamless and intuitive", it said. DBS then introduced new features including investment services and card activation. To date, there are more than 800,000 mBanking users in Singapore, DBS said.
The number of fund transfers made via mBanking had climbed 270 percent since its inception in 2011 to 7.4 million transactions last year. DBS now hopes the new mobile wallet would further drive peer-to-peer payments.
Louis Foo, the bank's senior vice president of consumer banking group e-business in Singapore, said in the statement: "Mobile payment is on an upward trajectory. While our customers have become increasingly tech-savvy, mobile wallets remain a new frontier in the Singapore's payment landscape.
"Hence, it is important to address customers' concerns while providing a mobile payment experience that is seamless and intuitive," said Foo, adding that innovation here must focus on improving user experience.
According to DBS, over 30 percent of 1 million online transactions the bank handles in a day are mobile transactions.
To further drive adoption among merchants, the Singapore is currently trialling a point-of-sales mobile app, dubbed MobilePay, that allows merchants to transact payments on-the-go.
More than 5,000 customers had signed up for the DBS PayLah mobile a week after the app was made available for free on Google Play Store and Apple App Store. To use the service, consumers must have a DBS or POSB account, as well as the bank's iBanking online account. Users will need the bank's iBanking 2FA token to top up their wallet for the first time.
DBS has more than 4.4 million customers in Singapore.