Manila MRT3 EMV and QR Acceptance - The GCash Commuter QR Code
As reported earlier, on July 25, 2025, MRT-3 in Manila started to accept GCash QR codes directly at the gate, without the need to buy a prepaid ticket.
I have not found reports of first-hand experience with this new feature. All I can talk about here is what I can deduce from the user experience with the GCash application and from comparing the QR code data to the QCAT specification. I cannot say anything about processing until I have tried it myself.
In summary, there does not seem to be much support for interoperability. I would say that the e-wallets may have missed a chance to compete with the payment cards schemes in the AFCS market.
QRPh Part 2 - The EMV Roots
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Banks and their regulators have been conditioned to believe that EMV is the global standard for card payments. It is therefore not surprising that all domestic QR payment standards, including QRPh, are based on the EMV QR specifications. For this reason, I am covering the design of the EMV specification, before I will go into the QRPh specification in one of the next posts.