Singapore, 31 January 2019… The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will give banks and credit card issuers more time to adopt the E-Payments User Protection Guidelines (“Guidelines”).

2.   The Guidelines aim to set standards in the following areas:
    a) Set out duties of financial institutions and users for secure e-payment transactions;
    b) Simplify error resolution processes when a user sends money to the wrong recipient; and
    c) Apportion liability between financial institutions and users for unauthorised transactions.

3.   The Guidelines were first issued in September 2018 and were originally scheduled to come into effect on 31 January 2019. The banks have requested MAS for more time to implement the Guidelines, owing to the scale and complexity of system changes needed to implement the transaction notification standards for all products and customers as set out in the Guidelines. MAS has agreed to adjust the effective start date to 30 June 2019.  After the Guidelines come into force, a more comprehensive notification alert process and framework for unauthorised transactions will be in place.

4.   In the meantime, MAS encourages consumers to enable notification alerts for such transactions as debit/credit cards payments, funds transfer and cash withdrawals where their bank is able to provide them.  Consumers may refer to their respective banks’ websites on how to do so or contact them if necessary.  Consumers should monitor these notification alerts closely and report unauthorised transactions immediately for their banks to follow up.  Consumers should also continue practicing good cyber hygiene¹ when using e-payments.

5.   For more information about the Guidelines, please refer to this link (660.1 KB).

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¹  A set of good practices that a user may adopt when using e-payments is set out in Part 3 of the Guidelines, in particular paragraphs 3.4 to 3.10.