Paying someone with OCBC online in Singapore
tl;dr
- the transfer process in unrelated to the value of the transfer so a $500,000 transfer would require the same convoluted process as a $0.05 transfer
- OCBC recommend their Pay Anyone service, which seems to require an App install and to be connected to the recipient by mobile number which sounds really awful to me. They say it's good for microtransactions on Carousell but even people I know who work on Carousell have never heard of anyone using this. Totally delusional and I wish they would fix their Web app flow.
On the ground OCBC are quite a good bank especially with their ATM availability. Online it is a bit of a nightmare.
Consider the use case of paying someone online 3.30SGD for an item on Carousell.
Ok, first login with that token you've misplaced. I am unable to login on my mobile. No idea why. So, on your laptop find the UI to pay someone under Transfer funds, other Singaporean accounts and remember POSB = DBS. If you got here without losing you mind, just you wait!
Now you need to ask the person who you are transferring to the:
- Name (as per bank record)
- Email address
For some reason, an account number is not enough with OCBC! Oh no!
Oh also, make sure you take out the dashes from the account number without accidentally removing a digit! Computers are really good at pruning characters, but OCBC programmers gets you to do this.
Now you need to "sign" the last 6 digits of the account number. Why? I have no idea. I just want to pay 3.30SGD and be done with it over 10 minutes ago. I don't want to purchase anything again from the seller hopefully so I don't want his account polluting my OCBC payees list. But you don't have that choice. March on!
Now you can choose the newly added payee to transfer 3.30SGD! Yahoo... oh but pickup the token again, now you need to enter a masked (seriously stupid) OTP password. It's a trivial sum FFS! WHY WHY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Ok, I should have just gone to Woodlands and met this guy in person to pay cash. It would be far easier to try do something online with OCBC.