18 April 2012
Editor
Forum Page

Straits Times

I was recently in China to handle a business transaction. I opened a bank account, received money into the account, made a ATM withdrawal and transfer some money to Singapore. I was impressed with the efficiency of the banking system in China. All the transactions were handled electronically with a bank card and a PIN. There was no need to verify my signature on the transactions, and no need to write any check.

My first experience with the banks in China was 20 years ago and the system then was backward.  China has made a lot of progress in the banking system since.

In contrast, the progress and development have been slow in Singapore. We are still using checks for many business payments. There is still a heavy reliance on signatures and documents that have to be sent in hard copy by post to the banks. I still receive many notifications from banks and other financial institutions by post which are often missed among the junk mail that flood my letter box.

I have my personal and business accounts with DBS Bank and can attest to the difficulty of using their internet banking facilities. It is so troublesome to make a payment electronically that I had to resort to writing checks quite often.

To make a electronic payment through my business account using the DBS IDEAL system, I have to enter 5 codes and go through 6 webpages to create a payment transaction and enter 3 codes and go through 2 webpages to authorize it. DBS Bank explained that this system was useful to make it easy for large companies to use batch processing to make many payments daily. They seem to forget that small companies also need to make payments and should not be required to go through this complicated process.

They also told me that there is a committee looking into the New Generation Payment System that will address the issues that I have raised. I recall reading about this project a few years ago and there is still no news about the implementation of this system. Does it have to take several years to streamline our payment system?

Tan Kin Lian