Technology

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.

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: