Singapore’s payments sector raises over US$319 million in funding for 9M 2025

[SINGAPORE] Investment in Singapore’s payments sector remains robust, with over US$319 million in funding raised in the first nine months of 2025, surpassing the combined fintech funding for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, which stood at US$104 million for the same period.

Singapore accounts for over 70 per cent of South-east Asia’s non-US Dollar stablecoin market pegged to the Singdollar, which is supported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) regulatory framework, said Singapore FinTech Association (SFA) in the Payment’s State of Play 2026 report on Wednesday (Feb 4).

The report, which stated that the payments sector is a subset of the fintech sector, said Singapore is the third largest foreign currency trading centre globally, with foreign exchange average daily trading volumes (ADTV) rising to US$1.48 trillion in April 2025, a 60 per cent increase from April 2022.

The growth of Singapore’s payments sector can be attributed to the city state’s development of “one of the most advanced, resilient and trusted payments ecosystems in the world”, said SFA president Holly Fang.

Domestically, payment systems like Fast (Fast And Secure Transfers) supported over 500 million transactions in 2024, a 31 per cent annual increase, for the 98 per cent of Singaporean adults who use digital wallets.

Total card payments and e-money value grew, respectively, at a compound annual growth rate of 12.9 and 7.3 per cent annually from 2020 to 2024, despite a 2.6 per cent decrease in transaction volume during the same period. 

The city-state’s payment sector growth is also driven by its regional cross-border connectivity. With initiatives to enhance cross-border real-time payments such as Project Nexus and bilateral PayNow linkages with Thailand and Malaysia, total remittance volume reached US$8.1 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to US$13.3 billion by 2032.

The total transaction value of Singapore’s digital payments market is projected to reach US$113.7 billion by 2030, an almost two-fold increase from US$39.3 billion in 2023. 

This growth will be fuelled by improvements and innovations of existing payments ecosystems. This includes increasing adoption of artificial intelligence to enhance fraud detection, mitigating fraud and scam risks, which caused losses of about S$840 million for 2025 up to November. 

Increasing cross-border interoperability of payments systems, embedding finance and super apps, and expansion of tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins will also reinforce Singapore’s payments sector’s growth.  

PwC Singapore partner Wong Wanyi said: “Singapore stands at the centre of this transformative era, where long-term success as a payments hub – and for industry players – calls for a comprehensive framework of controls and risk management, underpinned by clear regulatory guidance and high industry standards that encourage innovation, build trust, and sustain momentum across the ecosystem.”