DBS Group and Ant International signed a memorandum of understanding on 12 November 2025 to expand their cross-border payments collaboration, giving DBS PayLah! users access to QR payments at more than 150 million merchants across over 100 countries through the Alipay+ network. The agreement represents a particularly substantial extension of the reach of DBS's consumer payments application, which would gain access to one of the world's largest merchant acceptance networks through the partnership.
Beyond merchant QR acceptance, the MOU covers near-instant remittances between DBS clients and Alipay+'s network of approximately 1.8 billion accounts, as well as joint exploration of tokenised deposit innovations. The breadth of the agreement reflects both institutions' ambitions to deepen their infrastructure ties across the payments and digital assets space, moving well beyond a straightforward merchant acceptance arrangement and into longer-term structural collaboration that could span multiple product categories in the years ahead.
WEIXIN PAY DEAL ADDS CHINA PAYMENTS ACCESS
On the same day, DBS and Tencent's TenPay Global signed a separate MOU enabling DBS clients to use Weixin Pay QR codes for payments in China. The dual announcements collectively extend DBS customers' QR payment reach across two of the largest mobile-payment ecosystems in Asia, covering both the Alipay+ network — which is widely used across Southeast Asia and beyond — and the Weixin Pay system that dominates the Chinese mainland. Together, the two agreements give DBS PayLah! users a materially broader overseas payment footprint without requiring them to download or manage multiple apps.
For DBS, the agreements build on its existing regional payments infrastructure and reflect a strategy of expanding PayLah!'s utility through partnerships with established superapps rather than constructing parallel merchant acceptance networks independently. The ability for DBS customers to pay via familiar QR interfaces in markets from Southeast Asia to Europe simplifies the cross-border payments experience and potentially strengthens customer loyalty by making the bank's own application materially more useful in everyday overseas spending situations.
REMITTANCES AND TOKENISED DEPOSITS IN SCOPE
The remittance component of the Ant International MOU addresses a high-volume corridor that has historically been expensive and slow through traditional banking channels. Near-instant settlement between DBS accounts and Alipay+'s 1.8 billion-account base would provide both retail and business customers with an alternative route for moving money across borders, particularly within Asia where intra-regional remittance flows are substantial and price sensitivity among senders is high. For DBS, the ability to offer competitive remittance services through the Alipay+ infrastructure could strengthen its proposition for expatriate workers, small traders and multinational teams operating across Asian markets.
The reference to tokenised deposit innovation in the MOU indicates that DBS and Ant International intend to move beyond immediate payments infrastructure and investigate how blockchain-based representations of bank deposits might be used in future product structures. DBS has been an active participant in tokenisation experiments within Singapore's financial ecosystem, and the Ant International partnership extends that exploration into the commercial fintech space at considerable scale, potentially paving the way for programmable, cross-border financial products that combine the regulatory standing of bank deposits with the speed and programmability of digital-asset settlement rails.