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Payments glossary · Singapore

UnionPay

China’s card scheme, and also a QR rail — Chinese customers use it both ways, and enabling only the card side leaves the other half unserved. It is the scheme Singapore merchants most often forget to enable.

Why it matters to a merchant

The one that is two things at once, and merchants regularly have one without the other. A counter that accepts UnionPay cards has not necessarily been enabled for UnionPay QR, and a customer holding the app rather than the card will find that out at the till. Confirming both is a single question at onboarding.

Where this comes up

Pages on this site that deal with this in context:

Related terms

In this section: The methods themselves

Last updated: 2026-08-03

Written by the Uniweb Pay team, Singapore. Licence details are checked against the MAS Financial Institutions Directory, which is the authoritative source — where anything here disagrees with the register, the register wins.