How PayNow routes a payment
Rather than encoding an account number, a PayNow QR carries a proxy you have registered — your mobile number or NRIC as an individual, or your UEN as a business — and the banking system resolves that to the account currently linked to it. Payers in any participating bank app scan and transfer directly, and funds move immediately rather than clearing overnight.
The practical benefit of the proxy model is portability: change the account behind your proxy and every code you have already given out keeps working, because the code never named the account in the first place.
SGQR: one sticker, several schemes
SGQR is the national unified label. Because the underlying EMVCo format allows a code to carry several merchant identifiers at once, one SGQR sticker can present PayNow alongside other accepted schemes, and each payer’s app reads the identifier it recognises and ignores the rest.
This is why Singapore merchants generally display a single code rather than a row of wallet-specific ones, and it is a good illustration of what the EMVCo format is for. It also means you cannot meaningfully assemble an SGQR yourself: the combination is registered, not concatenated.
Getting your code
Individuals: open your banking app, link your mobile number or NRIC to PayNow, and use the “My QR” screen to display or export a personal receiving code. It costs nothing and takes a minute.
Businesses: register your UEN with your corporate bank, which issues a PayNow Corporate QR or arranges an SGQR label combining PayNow with your other accepted schemes. Business codes settle to a corporate account and give you the transaction references that make reconciliation possible.
What a generator can and cannot do
It cannot create a valid PayNow payload, because the payload is tied to a proxy registered in the banking system and, for merchants, to a registration only your bank can make. A tool that claims otherwise is producing a pattern that will not resolve.
It is genuinely useful for the rest of the counter: a QR to your online ordering page, your menu, a feedback form, or your WiFi credentials. Those are static codes in the ordinary sense — the data is in the pattern, nothing expires and no intermediary is involved.
Printing that actually scans
Print large enough for the distance it will be scanned from, keep dark modules on white, and leave the quiet zone around the pattern clear. Avoid glossy laminate under bright ceiling lights; a matte finish removes most glare failures.
Test with more than one bank app before a print run — cameras and decoders differ, and a code that scans on one phone at arm’s length can fail on another in poor light.
Need a general-purpose code instead? Use the free QR code generator — it runs entirely in your browser.