SGQR or PayNow — which one should loyalty run on?

The question gets asked because both appear on the same sticker. SGQR is the unified labelling standard that consolidates the schemes you accept; PayNow is a specific transfer rail that runs to a proxy — for a business, your UEN. So SGQR is not competing with PayNow; it is displaying it.

For retention the decision that matters is which rail you nudge guests towards, because rails differ in two ways: what they cost you per transaction, and how consistently they expose a reference you can match a returning guest on.

PayNow to a corporate UEN generally wins on both counts. Transfers into a business account are typically free or near-free, and the payer reference is consistent enough that the same guest paying twice looks like the same guest. Card and wallet rails carry the usual merchant rate, and the reference they expose varies by provider — so test what actually lands in your settlement file before you build reporting on it.

None of this identifies anybody on its own. A hashed reference tells you that guest #4,182 came back; it does not tell you their name, and under the PDPA you need consent before you use their data for marketing. In practice that means one clear line at the point of capture and a real opt-out in every message you send.

Cash is the honest gap. A venue where a third of the bill is still cash cannot rely on the payment rail alone, and needs a second capture route — a QR on the receipt, or a table talker — so the guest record does not quietly become a record of only the guests who tap.