Bangkok Life Hacks: International Fund Transfer from Thailand to Singapore via Bangkok Bank Mobile Banking. Fast, Convenient, Low Fees.

I don’t think anyone expected the pandemic situation to last for years when it first broke loose around Chinese New Year in 2020, but it has. In fact, the general situation is getting from bad to worse in most countries. I bet many of you are like me, stuck in Thailand for the longest time yet without traveling home and from what I see in many forums, practical things like transferring money in Thailand back to Singapore are increasingly becoming an issue.

I believe many of us might be familiar with some usual suspects like DeeMoney who can do the job, but while they are established and can help with larger amounts, signing up for a new account requires us to physically verify our identity at an agent location (which is risky in the current climate in Thailand), and the money will reach the payee in at least 1-3 working days.

Enter Bangkok Bank, which since end April 2021, has successfully unveiled the linkage of Thailand's PromptPay and Singapore's PayNow real-time retail payment systems. This means that, if you have a Bangkok Bank account and are using their mobile app, you can do an immediate cross-border fund transfer simply with a Singapore phone number linked to the payee’s Paynow account. The daily transfer limit (also single transaction limit) is currently set as 1000SGD, and there’s a fixed transaction fee of 150THB.

If you are worried about the exchange rate, it will be based on Bangkok Bank’s real-time T/T selling rate, which you can check here.

At the time of writing, the selling rate of SGD on powerhouse Money Exchange Service Superrich is 24.55 for amounts less than 1000SGD, so it’s extremely close and competitive.

So if you want to see the full instructions, you can either refer to this page, or watch the short video below (in Thai with English captions). Just know that if you want to pay a friend in Singapore for helping you to buy something, give your parents/sibling/children their monthly allowance, or even transfer them a birthday/CNY blessing, it’s really as simple as paying for your delivery meal now.

PS. Using the same gateway, you can also transfer money from Singapore to Thailand with the same daily limits.