The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Association of Banks in Singapore announced a PayNow Generation 2 study covering four potential upgrades to Singapore's national instant payments infrastructure. The work focuses on making PayNow usable across more payment contexts, improving online checkout, supporting larger-value payments to public agencies and building longer-term capabilities for new business use cases. The proposed enhancements are improving interoperability between PayNow and NETS QR so consumers can pay any merchant regardless of scheme, with a pilot targeted by end-2026; adding deep-linking within PayNow QR codes for online checkout, which MAS and ABS expect to be ready within a year; and enabling larger-value public-sector PayNow transactions through a sandboxed pilot with transaction limits and safeguards, due to start with government agencies next year. A fourth workstream covers longer-term capabilities including request-to-pay, structured data for automated reconciliation, a micro-payments rail, expanded cross-border connectivity, stronger operational resilience such as offline payments and functions to support agentic commerce. The four areas were identified through consultations with 37 organisations and benchmarking against 11 jurisdictions. MAS and ABS said the next phase will turn the Phase 1 findings into detailed implementation steps with industry participants and develop pilots for selected enhancements. An implementation roadmap is due by end-2026.

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