Crossborder QR payments in SEA
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.