Smile Asia is a global alliance of charities helping children with cleft and other facial conditions get access to safe, high-quality treatment. There are more than 250,000 children across Asia still waiting for cleft surgery, and every year another 10,000 or so go without it.
Through medical missions, care centres and collaborative training, Smile Asia provides free surgeries, strengthens surgical care and brings treatment closer to communities in Asia. Between them they have delivered 99,072 surgeries to date. And the Singapore member, The Smile Mission, has supported 33,210 medical evaluations and 22,214 surgeries, as at the end of 2025.
All of that runs on donations. And a good chunk of those donations are done online.
Where online donations go
When someone taps donate and pays by card, the money may not always go immediately to the charity, but through a payment gateway. The gateway holds it, batches it, and pays it out to the charity’s bank account some days later, minus a cut.
For an online retailer, that cut is a cost of doing business. And those fees can add up.
But for a non-profit, donations are different. Someone gave that money for a specific purpose, and they hope and expect that the amount is fully utilised to advance the cause they donated to.
To ensure that as much of the donation amount is available to Smile Asia, it accepts PayNow payments in Singapore. Key reasons:
No middleman. A PayNow transfer goes straight from the donor’s bank account to the charity’s bank account. In contrast, with a credit card gateway, the money lands in the gateway’s balance first, and it leaves on the gateway’s schedule rather than the donor’s.
The money is there straight away. No waiting for a payout run. Most payment gateways schedule a new account’s first payout to complete within 7 to 14 days, and settlement after that still runs a few working days behind the payment. But with PayNow, the treasurer opens the bank account and the donation is already in it.
Frictionless. Two-thirds of Gen-Z in Singapore already name PayNow as their preferred payment method. A donor scanning a QR with their banking app is doing the same thing they do at a hawker centre, which means there is nothing to teach them.
The donor sees who they are paying. Before confirming, the banking app shows the recipient’s business name to check against. Unlike credit card payments where the recipient only appears on the statement later on.
Making PayNow payments easier
Smile Asia chose the PayNow QR payments plugin for WooCommerce (built by Halfborg) as their payment method plugin to accept PayNow donations. Rather than displaying a generic QR code all over the site, this plugin makes it easier for donors to pay the amount they want, and for Smile Asia to reconcile transaction IDs and amounts to donors.
Now, the donor simply has to pick PayNow as the payment method at checkout, submit the order, and a QR comes up for them to scan. The money lands in the charity’s own bank account, with nobody in between, and nothing taken out of it on the way.
Another benefit of the plugin is that the QR code is set to the exact amount, and already contains a reference id. This reduces errors, both in customers choosing the amount, as well as Smile Asia during reconciliation.
“Thanks to this plugin, it’s more convenient for donors to support our cause. The level of support Halfborg provided throughout has been excellent”
– Abhimanyu Talukdar, Secretary-General, Smile Asia
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