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The large-scale rollout of NFC terminals in the wake of QR acceptance, paired with the ubiquitous cross-border acceptance of EMV payment cards and the eminent suitability of contactless EMV for mass transit account-based ticketing, has put QR payment systems on the backfoot.

Just when we thought traditional payment cards have lost the race, they are rapidly eating into the QR payment lead.

The solutions are clear to me. QR payment systems must come together and build a cross-border system that deserves its name, and they have to transition to the NFC interface of the mobile phones^[1] for mutual authentication.

One might ask why bother with some NFC-QR contraption when we already have EMV, which is proven and works globally. My answer would be that it would indeed be a waste of time if NFC-QR simply mimics the EMV-based payment schemes.

But if the QR payment providers remember that there is more to QR payment than just the mobile phone camera and a checkerboard of ones and zeros, NFC-QR can be more than an imitation of EMV.

In fact, when you add authentication and mutual data exchange at the point of interaction, you will find that many things are possible that would require cost-prohibitive changes to traditional payment schemes.

One such option would be a sender-centric QR-NFC system. In my article I am outlining such a system using the example of account-based automated fare collection.

This LinkedIn post (1) claims that customers from most South East Asian countries can now use their domestic e-wallets for payments at China UnionPay merchants in China. This article (2) reports that customers using the AliPay app will be able to scan VietQRGlobal QR codes in Vietnam to pay with Yuan.

Other sources on the Internet seem to suggest that at the end of 2025 a number of pilots have started to test the interoperability between China and SEA countries.

New reports of cross-border acceptance initiatives are coming out almost every week. Here is one from today (3).

All of these projects suffer from the same issues – they are obscure, fragmented, complex and unsustainable. The reason is clear. Asia has missed an opportunity to establish a standard for cross-border QR payments. So far all that has been achieved is a hotchpotch of point-to-point connections that offer an illusion of an international payment system.

A giant leap for Japan, but a step backwards for the AFCS industry? (1)

That was the question that popped into my head when I read the news that JR East is planning to replace magnetic stripe tickets with QR codes in 2027. If the images associated with this announcement are to be believed, then Japanese railway passengers can look forward to printed QR paper tickets, no less!

I have no doubt that as long as Japan remains a low-crime, high-trust society, this will work as well as you would expect from Japan and especially from its railway operators.

Account-based QR ticketing is surprisingly challenging to implement.

The timing and throughput requirements of a mass transit system such as the LRT and MRT lines in Manila require an offline decision by the gate or validator. We also have to accept that delayed uploads and missing records cannot entirely be avoided.

As a result, the matching algorithm for entry and exit records gets riddled with exceptions. In fact, no matter how we design the system, a certain number of records will refuse any attempt of matching and fare calculation.

While I will focus on the matching of entry and exit records, a complete solution must also consider liability allocation and requires a certain amount of risk acceptance. Any attempt to make an QR account-based ticketing system fool prove with no chance of even the tiniest loss will fail!

I have gathered my thoughts on the topic, but I feel that there is a lot more to say. Please do not consider this little write-up the be-all and end-all on the subject.

I was asked recently how I would design an account-based QR code ticketing solution. That is a simple question. But it would require more than one article to even just scratch the surface.

It brought back memories of discussions about static offline authentication and other topics which I thought are buried and forgotten under the thousands of pages of EMV specification and the long-winded migration from magnetic stripe to chip cards.

But here we go again. The good old magnetic stripe swipe under the "modern" guise of a QR code scan.

Nevertheless, I am old enough to remember most of it and decided to take a quick shot in this article.

A message exchange on FaceBook prompted me to write a response to my friend Regie, which became so long that I turned it into an article.

I already talked about the risk of anonymous account-based transit cards in my previous article (1). In this piece I am adding a couple thoughts on the topic.

In my dream team AFCS (here)(1), I declared the transit card to be "the backbone of my ideal AFCS." I made the implicit assumption that the transit card would be an offline stored value card.

This assumption wasn’t quite correct. A transit card does not have to be a stored value offline card. It can be account-based as well. The question is whether it is possible to build an AFCS in the Philippines that dispenses with the offline stored-value altogether and make everything, including the transit card, account-based.

I think it will be difficult under the unique circumstances of the Filipino market. While the benefits of an account-based transit card may outweigh its disadvantages, it remains to be seen whether the transit operators will accept the residual risk of delayed online authorization.

In March 2026, a number of international, i.e. foreign, companies have attended the market sounding of the DOTr in Singapore (see (1), (2)). My empathy score is rather low, but even I worry about them.

During my time at AF Payments, I learned that the live of a concessionaire is not always easy. I often thought about what we could have done better or different.

That is why I have collected a few recommendations, especially for non-filipino companies who might consider entering the bidding process for the Philippines AFCS concession.

For the readers who cannot be bothered to read the whole thing, here are the top five tips:

Sports fans sometimes assemble their own virtual dream teams. The teams have nothing to do with reality other than the names of the players. The dream team will never play together, but apparently fans have some fun with it.

Team sports do not interest me. However, I have spent hours watching YouTube videos of people repairing an Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). In my defense, this AGC actually went to the moon and back!

It is therefore not entirely out of character that I thought it would be fun to assemble my dream team Philippines AFCS, and I hope you won’t find this any stranger than a "football dream team".

My article has become rather long, even so I have still only scratched the surface. In case you do not want to read the whole thing, these are the main principles of my ideal AFCS:

In 2014, AF Payments won the concession for the automated fare collection system of the three light rail systems in Manila. The concession was supposed to run for ten years, but as far as I know, it is still going, so they must have agreed to extend by a few years.

During my time with AFPI, I devoted a lot of time dealing with the Concession and the government. At times my patience was severely tested.

As such I got my virtual popcorn out when I learned the exciting news that the Department of Transportation (DOTr) has announced that they will open the bidding for a new Philippine Automated Fare Collection System (PAFCS) concession this year.

I confess that I am not the "bigger person" here. I am fascinated by the spectacle of somebody else being lead to the slaughter.

There is not much more information about the content of the bidding document which was developed by ADB (1). As usual, I took some educated guesses and summarized the little there is in my new blog post.