Pandemic leads to surge in real-time payment transactions in 2020

Real-time payment transactions rose by 48% last year, according to ACI Worldwide Research.

Real-time payments saw a surge in the Lion City, as the pandemic swept the globe in 2020.

According to the latest global report from international thinktank ACI Worldwide, real-time payments in Singapore rose by 48% in 2020, at a total of 138.38 million transactions.

The value of these transactions rose by 40% to $154b in 2020, from the $110b recorded in 2019.

"The pandemic has cast the spotlight on the importance of digital payments and robust payment infrastructures, condensing a decade of anticipated innovation into one year and creating human behavioural changes that will not reverse as we emerge from the crisis," said ACI Worldwide chief product officer Jeremy Wilmot in a statement.

Singapore also recorded a historic high in the adoption of mobile wallets to 70.9% in 2020, trumping the 56.9% and 27.5% recorded in 2019 and 2018 respectively.

ACI expects 2 23.21% compound annual growth rate for Singapore from 2020 to 2025.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia