Singapore's Light-Touch Payment Licence Has 13 Holders

Singapore's Payment Services Act has two licences for payment firms. The heavier one, the major payment institution, carries a duty to safeguard customer money. The lighter one is for firms below the thresholds.

As of today the register has 245 major payment institutions and 13 standard ones. Nineteen to one.

What the two licences mean

The regulator's own descriptions are short. A major payment institution "provides any combination of regulated payment services, regardless of transactional volume or e-money held", is "subject to more comprehensive regulation", and "must comply with requirements to protect customer money". A standard payment institution provides the same combination of services "below specified transactional or e-money thresholds".

The lighter tier exists so that a small firm can start without the full weight. Thirteen firms in the country are using it.

Beside those two sit the other payments licences: 230 money-changing licensees, six designated payment system operators, six settlement institutions for those systems, four credit and charge card licensees and one licensed credit bureau.

The licence is mostly a remittance licence

The register records which of the seven regulated payment services each firm may provide. Counted across the 245 major institutions, one service dominates: 220 of them hold cross-border money transfer. That is 90%.

Domestic money transfer follows at 146, merchant acquisition at 102, account issuance at 89 and e-money issuance at 76. Digital payment tokens, the crypto permission, sit at 38, and money-changing at 35.

Fifty-six of the 245 hold exactly one service. Forty-two of those hold only cross-border money transfer, thirteen only digital payment tokens, and one only domestic transfer.

So a large part of what Singapore calls its payments industry is a remittance industry with a wider name over the door.

Nobody holds all seven

The spread across firms is narrow at the top. Fifty-six hold one service, 55 hold two, 55 hold three, 27 hold four, 45 hold five and seven hold six.

No payment institution in Singapore holds all seven. The seven firms with six are Digital Treasures Center, iChange, MoolahGo, PayPal, Revolut Technologies Singapore, Xfers and XREX.

Among standard payment institutions the ceiling is lower still: the widest holds four services, and none holds a digital payment token licence at all. Every one of the 38 payment institutions licensed for digital payment tokens is in the major tier.

Why this matters to anyone picking a partner here

Two practical readings.

First, a Singapore payment licence does not tell you what the firm can do for you. A counterparty described as "MAS licensed" may hold one permission out of seven, and the most common single permission is remittance. The service list on the register entry is the thing to check, not the licence name.

Second, the tier itself carries the safeguarding duty. Customer money protection attaches to the major licence. With 245 holders against 13, almost every licensed payment firm in Singapore is inside that regime, which is a better position for a merchant than the headline count of licences suggests.

How these numbers were produced

MAS publishes the counts as filter facets on its directory. HaiPay did not take them on trust. Every listing page for both tiers was retrieved, 262 rows for major institutions and 13 for standard ones, and each institution's own page was read for its service list.

The 262 rows resolve to 245 companies, because 16 companies appear twice, once per trading name. After merging those, the per-service counts computed from the institution pages match the regulator's facet counts exactly, service by service.

What this is not

A permission is what a firm may do, not what it does. The register reports no volumes, no customer numbers and no float.

The count is of licensed payment institutions, not of everyone moving money in Singapore. Banks, which hold their own licences, are not in it, and neither are exempt entities.

The breadth figures depend on the directory being current. Each entry shows its own last-updated date; the directory pages read today carry dates in 2026, and HaiPay did not audit the currency of all 258 entries.

HaiPay counted only the payments sector of the directory. Firms may hold licences in other sectors as well, and this article does not net those out.

HaiPay did not contact MAS or any licensee.

What to watch

Whether the standard tier stays empty in practice. Thirteen holders is the clearest signal in this data, and it either means the thresholds are set too low to be useful or that firms would rather hold the licence that lets them grow without reapplying.

Whether the digital payment token count moves off 38, and whether any of those firms ever appears in the standard tier.

And whether anyone ever takes the seventh permission. The gap between six and seven has been empty the whole way.