Media Releases

Comprehensive package to help heartland SMEs kickstart their digitalisation journey with hands on training and advice during COVID-19 Circuit Breaker

SINGAPORE, 11 May 2020 – To help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) mitigate the challenges brought about by COVID-19 to the retail landscape, Nanyang Polytechnic’s Singapore Institute of Retail Studies (NYP-SIRS), NETS and SCash have rolled out a ground-up initiative to support SMEs’ digitalisation transformation. This was announced by Guest-of-Honour, Mr Chee Hong Tat, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Education, at a retail webinar ‘Braving the storm through digital transformation’ earlier today.
 

2          This initiative, developed by NYP-SIRS, NETS and SCash, and supported by Alibaba Cloud Singapore, aims to help SMEs establish their electronic and mobile commerce channels with ease and be connected immediately to a wide network of ready customers. This is particularly useful to SMEs who have been hit by the impact of COVID-19, or whose business have been affected due to the reduction in customer walk-ins.

3          Through the initiative, SCash developed the Mobile Phone enabled Commerce Store to integrate with eNETS, thereby allowing heartland micro-retailers and SMEs to have their own individual virtual store, alike their physical store. Each virtual store owner can engage customers one-on-one with loyalty reward points or discount vouchers; which might not be able to be done today if they run businesses in eMarketplace. To support businesses during the COVID-19 circuit breaker, NETS will waive service fees upon sign up, while SCash will waive its monthly service fee until end 2020. NYP-SIRS will support this initiative by providing a one-day workshop to prepare the merchants to sustain the business operation after SCash-NETS’ setup of the mobile phone virtual store.

4          Ms Megan Ong, Director of NYP-SIRS, said: “As Singapore’s pioneer training provider for the retail industry, NYP-SIRS runs numerous courses to help upskill and prepare our retail workforce to rise to the challenge of emerging trends. This comes at an important time as COVID-19 has taken a toll on physical shops. Digital orders have on the other hand increased. We need to help our SMEs transition to digital now.

5          “Through this partnership with SCash and NETS, we leverage our retail training expertise to ensure that SMEs are properly equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to navigate and excel in mobile e-commerce. To ensure training relevancy, we will also contextualise the content to suit the needs of these SMEs and micro-SMEs who might be from different trade backgrounds.”

6          Mr Ang Sok Hong, NETS’ Head of Merchant Acquisition and Bank Partnerships said: “We are pleased to partner with NYP-SIRS and SCash to enable online payment for SME merchants to drive sales in the digital space. With NETS, merchants can easily integrate a convenient and seamless payment process into the whole shopping experience on this e-commerce platform for their customers.”

7          Mr Michael Lee, SCash’s CEO, said: “The success of business in the future will be dependent on the depth of digitisation. This means they need to learn how to LMS: Leverage on Omnichannel and platform; Make it easy for people to do business with you online; and Select the right technology that drives revenue and saves cost.”

8          NYP-SIRS will be organising a second webinar on 13 May (Wed) in English. More details of the Webinar can be found at http://bit.ly/retail-transformation-english.
 

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About the Singapore Institute of Retail Studies

Nanyang Polytechnic’s Singapore Institute of Retail Studies (NYP-SIRS) is a national training institute, appointed to transform the workforce in Singapore’s retail industry. Set up jointly by the Polytechnic and SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), NYP-SIRS works closely with the industry to support the retail sector through consultancy, executive programmes, applied research, solutions development, continuing education training. as well as placement services.

About NETS

The NETS Group is a leading payments services group, enabling digital payments for merchants, consumers and banks across the entire payments value chain.

The Group operates Singapore’s national debit scheme enabling customers of DBS Bank/POSB, HSBC, Maybank, OCBC Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and UOB to make payments using their ATM cards or mobile devices at more than 120,000 acceptance points in the country as well as online payments. The NETS network also accepts NETSPay, UnionPay and BCA cards, and includes 54,000 Unified POS terminals and 96,000 QR acceptance points. NETS is also the issuer of CashCard and Flashpay cards.

The NETS Group manages and operates the clearing and payment infrastructure for the Singapore Clearing House Association and core electronic transfer services FAST, Inter-bank GIRO and PayNow.

It is the market leader for payment and clearing solutions (Real-Time Gross Settlement system and Cheque Truncation System) in the region with some S$1 trillion in transaction value processed through its systems every year.

NETS is a member of the Asian Payment Network and a council member of UnionPay International.

For more information on the NETS Group, please visit www.nets.com.sg

About SCash

Founded in 2017 by CEO Michael Lee, SCash empowers merchants with market-leading Swift, Safe and Smart mobile technology based on its IP portfolio of Merchant Experience Management (MEM), Loyalty & Membership System, Module on Demand (MOD) and Automation System. SCash continually implements forward-looking merchant solutions to better engage consumers.

Factsheet on SCash-NETS Mobile Commerce Solution

The SCash-NETS mobile phone-based commerce store solution allows traditional merchants to setup a virtual store to reach out to a larger market share through eCommerce. This is particularly useful for traditional merchants who do not have the know-how to move their business online, while their physical business continues to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Upon set up, customers can access the virtual store via internet link URL or QR code scan when they pass by the physical store and bookmark the URL for subsequent orders. Once the customer has made their first purchase through the virtual online store, the merchant can then continue to engage the customer online through loyalty reward points or discount vouchers, all through a seamless customer experience.

To enable merchants to kickstart their digitalisation journey, SCash and NETS will offer zero start-up cost for onboarding merchants. Details of the fees are appended below.

NYP-SIRS will provide a one-day workshop to guide SME merchants on digital transformation. The merchants will then be trained on the setup and managing of their mobile phone based virtual store online, and the subsequent one-on-one virtual customer engagement.

For more information, please visit https://bit.ly/scashnetsform.