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.
Unfortunately, it is only an illusion. The reality is that customers have little chance to figure out whether their QR payment application will work in another country or not .
In the case of China, there is an additional complication. Chinese payment companies are so dominant due to the sheer size of their market and operations that there is a real risk of Chinese players becoming the monopolies in the QR payment world that everybody just thought they had escaped by moving away from Visa and MasterCard.
The question is what a cross-border QR payment system should look like. What parts need to be standardized and what should be left to competition? Earlier articles on the same topic here (5) and here (6)).
What is Holding Back the Industry?
Anybody designing an interoperable cross-border payment system would need to establish a common understanding of what "interoperability" means. I have been in many meetings where hours of discussions took place with everybody having a different idea of what they mean by interoperability. At one time, my insistence on a definition before even starting the conversation was met with outright hostility.
Many companies, especially the ones who see themselves on the winning side, look with suspicion at the concept of interoperability. For them, their protocols and regulations are the moat around their castle. Interoperability means lowering the drawbridge and allowing others to compete on a level playing field.
Another complication is that it is exceedingly difficult to write standards that cannot be misinterpreted either subtlety or by turning them into the exact opposite of what was intended. Clinton’s famous line "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." comes to mind.
In my view, interoperability needs to address three requirements:
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simplicity and reliability of the end-user experience, and
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the establishment of trust between independent players that do not know each other.
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independence from government regulations to the greatest extend possible (Just imagine where Visa and MasterCard would be today if Central Banks had been given a say how international card payments should work! We would still fill in forms at the point of sale and magnetic stripe technology would just be around the corner.)
As much as possible must be left to the proprietary implementation of each participant in the system.
The Customer Perspective
From the viewpoint of a customer, the gold standard for interoperable cross-border payments are the legacy credit and debit card schemes.
Any cross-border QR system will have to meet the same standard and exceed card payments in areas where traditional cards are not so great. For instance, delayed settlement, obscure merchant names, uncertainty which currency exchange, how many fees will be applied and so forth.
The litmus test for a successful cross-border QR payment system implementation is a customer who feels confident to leave the hotel with just their mobile phone and their home QR app. If customers feel they need to bring a card or cash, just in case the QR app does not work, then they will simply use the card and stop trying the QR app which will too often disappoint or embarrass them.
In somewhat more detail this would mean:
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Expectations of ubiquitous acceptance in all participating countries at all QR accepting merchants
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Confidence that the QR payment will work in almost all cases
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Simple and consistent signage that signifies cross-border acceptance
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Know in advance where their QR app can be used for payment
For customers who already pay with their QR app at home, using the QR app abroad won’t be an issue. However, in most countries, people still use their payment cards. For them to switch to QR payment in other countries will require more than just offering the same service as traditional cards.
The Merchant Perspective
For merchants the payment process needs to be fast and reliable. The cost per transaction needs to be on par with other payment methods or lower.
Even more important, a cross-border system design needs to acknowledge that both, customer and merchant, benefit from using QR payments. Therefore, both sides need to pay the their fair share to the respective provider of services. There must not be any interchange fees and prices need to be the result of lots of competition and not government regulations!
Processes for settlement, daily reconciliation, dispute resolution need to be robust, simple and fast.
QR payments grew so rapidly because merchants could be enrolled at almost no cost. It needs to be the same for cross-border payments. Participation in a cross-border scheme should be more or less automatic for any merchant who already accepts any of the local QR schemes.
Dispute Resolution
Traditional payment schemes have complicated dispute resolution procedures.
The procedures are complicated due to historical ballast, outdated technology and scheme rules of a complexity that put the German tax code to shame. For instance, disputes with regard to floor limits, cardholder authentication, amount splitting, settlement timelines and many others simply don’t apply anymore.
QR payments don’t carry this historical ballast and can design simple dispute rules. It is best to disregard existing dispute resolution rules altogether and start fresh.
The basis should be that disputes over the liability for transactions should only arise from security breaches (traditional fraud) and from not following the basic rules of the system.
Situations in which neither side denies involvement in the transaction and in which each side followed the rules, that is, the payment is not actually under dispute, should be resolved outside the system. Commercial disputes have nothing to do with payment. In other areas this principle is already well established. For instance, nobody would ask a bank to get involved in a property dispute, just because a bankers cheque was used to pay for it!
The realtime nature of the fund transfer creates challenges, but also opportunities. For instance, for merchants that are new to the system or that are in a high-risk business or that have a disproportionate number of complaints, the receiving participants could establish a system where money is moved into an escrow account for a certain amount of time.
In any case, as long as the receiving participant has to get disputed funds back from the merchant, the motivation to manage merchants properly is much higher and does not require expensive scheme enforcement programs.
Full transparency on the merchant side and maximum customer control are two additional principles, which I have already described here.
Online vs. Offline Transactions
As long as QR payments are based on scanning QR codes, international QR payments must be fully online. Payer and payee must have a real-time connection to their respective QR provider.
The problem is that the payer, by definition, is in a foreign country. Therefore, a good portion of potential payers wouldn’t have an internet connection on their phone.
The long term solutions are clear: QR-NFC, instant offline approval from a secure processing environment (potentially with allocated offline-balance) in combination with delayed funds transfer.
QR-NFC may sound strange, but referee to a simple concept. There is no reason why the data embedded in a QR code could not also be transferred to the payee device via NFC. The advantage of doing it that way would be that offline dynamic authentication of the payee device is possible. If the payee can trust the payer device, they can also, to some extend, trust the payment authorization, even so they will only get confirmation from their QR provider when the payer has already left. Whenever the payer get access to an Internet connection, the QR payment app would then submit the transaction detail and initiate a delayed funds transfer.
The introduction of NFC and offline authentication would create the same barriers that delayed the introduction of EMV for decades. In my view, any QR-NFC solution would need to be build on the existing foundation of EMV acceptance by utilizing the EMV protocols between layer and payee device.
That does not mean that the QR cross-border system should voluntarily put on the shackles of EMV certifications and let the legacy payment systems dictated the rules. EMV should be used strictly as a technical standard and the QR system should pick only the part of the standard that are necessary for the transfer of data and for offline authentication.
The QR code
The QR code design would need to take into account a number of requirements:
- How much data and processing should be done in the backend and how much data should be provided through the QR code
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In my view, QR payments happen in the backend and the necessity of adding anything more than a transaction reference number in the QR code should be considered carefully. Fact is, that that most of the QR data is ignored by the backend anyway, and whatever data is needed can be more securely transferred between the payer and payee device and their own QR payment provider more easily and safely.
Any design would always have two options to chose from: perform risk management and make the money available based on data in the QR code, or do it based on data provided by the payee QR provider in the payment request. In the first case, you would need to perform some form of data authentication or compare the QR data with the data received in the payment request. In the second case, you would have the extra step of sending the data back to the payer phone for payer authorization.
- What technical format should the QR code standard follow
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This question has already been answered by the national standards in most of the South East Asian countries. The QR code data must follow the EMV merchant-presented format (8). That is an unfortunate truth.
- Should we use the national QR standards or create a cross-border QR standard
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Given that each country in South East Asia is transitioning to a national unified QR code standard, for instance Malaysia (11), or Philippines (12) , it is not out of the question to just use it for cross-border payments as well. After all there are only 48 countries in Asia and all of them use the same basic format for their QR codes.
This approach would have two major drawbacks. Firstly, each payer QR provider would have to implement the routing logic for each country separately. And, secondly, an expansion to a truly global cross-border QR payment standard would be difficult as each new participating country would require each payer QR provider to change their applications.
On the other hand, we would have to consider that the payee does not know whether the payer participates in the domestic or the cross-border payment scheme. If there was a cross-border QR code that is different from the domestic one, the payee would need to ask the ayer to create the correct QR code. Given that the vast majority are domestic payers, this would never work at scale.
We are left with the choice to either transition all countries to a unified QR code, even for domestic transactions, or to use domestic national QR codes standards.
Another option would be to define common data requirements that can be included in the existing standards. The QR standards usually allow for extra data to be included. In domestic transactions the extra data can be ignored (and well-designed application will already do that), and for cross-birder transactions it will be used.
Competitive Advantages of Cross-border QR over Traditional Systems
One could ask the question why bother with a new cross-border system given that the existing card payments have done cross-border payments for decades.
I think there are good reasons for a new cross-border payment system.
Domestic QR payments have created an acceptance market that traditional card payments could not penetrate. In many asian markets, QR payments dwarf the traditional card systems. However, as the QR acceptance markets matures, more and more merchants deploy payment terminals that are EMV enabled.
As a result, traditional card payments benefit from the expanding acceptance infrastructure and cross-border card payments become available in many locations that would never have accepted international cards if it hadn’t been for the domestic QR payment.
Domestic card payments benefit equally, and suddenly merchants will gravitate towards card payments as the only solution that provides international and domestic acceptance.
The only way for the new QR payments industry to combat that thread is to offer ubiquitous and interoperable cross-border payments as well.
However, the QR payment industry is not just trying to emulate cross-border card payments. QR payments have an opportunity to add features which make QR payments appealing for cross-border payments.
Currency Conversion
Since the money is taken out of the payer’s account immediately, the actual transaction amount in the payer’s home currency is also available at the time of transaction.
Unfortunately, this may also be a stumbling block for the payee side who is interested in performing the currency conversion themselves to benefit from the spread in the conversion rates.
I think there are technical solutions that would simply start with the payee offering a price in the home currency. Even then, the payer service provider could offer a better rate right there on the phone of the payer.
Transaction Transparency
It is in the nature of QR payments that the payer’s payment application has an instant record of all transaction details. This would include the merchant name which can be compared in realtime to the name of the location where the payment takes place.
The payer would also know at all times how much money has been spend and how much money is still available, either as account balance or credit/over-draft line.
Improved Fraud Risk Management
Untraditional card payments, risk management is mostly based on information that is transferred from the payee via the acquirer and card networks to the issuer. The correctness, completeness and usefulness of this data has been an issue forever and, seeing the tightening of rules by the schemes, seems to be an issue even today.
For QR payments, there is an opportunity to use the mobile phone of the payer to enrich the data that is available for fraud management.
Especially GPS data has a lot of potential. For instance, should you allow a transaction in which the GPS location of the payer mobile phone differs from the location of the payee as record in the payee database?
Payer Empowerment
As the transactions take place on the personal phone, the available balance can be checked in realtime, additional controls such as maximum daily or accumulative amounts for a trip or country can be set and so forth.
This is an area where eWallets have a wonderful opportunity to compete by giving customers additional controls in a user-friendly way.
Promotions can be compared between eWallets in realtime, and it would not take a PhD to figure out whether the promotion advertised on the merchant’s premises actually applies.
References
(1) Plenora Pulse: Fintech Edition, “The latest move by UnionPay International is a perfect example of where we’re headed. They’ve just enabled 25 international wallets from 11 different countries and regions to pay directly at tens of millions of merchants across mainland China.” Plenora Pulse: Fintech Edition, May 2025, Accessed: Feb. 01, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/plenora_the-latest-move-by-unionpay-international-activity-7423276982240702465-upHp.
(2) V. T.- L. Thanh, “Cross-border QR payments expanded to ease Chinese tourists’ spending in Vietnam,” Tuoi Tre News, Apr. 2026, Accessed: Apr. 05, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://news.tuoitre.vn/cross-border-qr-payments-expanded-to-ease-chinese-tourists-spending-in-vietnam-103260404150619321.htm.
(3) J. N. Shofa, “Indonesia, India to Connect QR Payment Systems by End-2026.” https://jakartaglobe.id/business/indonesia-india-to-connect-qr-payment-systems-by-end2026 , Jul. 2026, Accessed: Jul. 08, 2026. [Online].
(4) W. Kritsakorn, “Cross-Border QR Payments in Bangkok Food Court.” https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7479715369117564928 , Jul. 2026, Accessed: Jul. 08, 2026. [Online].
(5) I. Noka, “Cross-border QR Payments - How difficult is it?,” Medium - Payment in Asia, May 2024, [Online]. Available: https://medium.com/payment-in-asia/cross-border-qr-payments-cc1aa268fb9b.
(6) I. Noka, “QR Crossborder Payments in Asia.” https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/post/qr-cross-border-how-difficult/ , Apr. 2026, Accessed: Jul. 09, 2026. [Online].
(7) I. Noka, “QR and Fare Collection - Online or Offline?” https://afcsblog.ingonoka.com/post/qr-afcs-online-vs-offline/ , Jul. 2026, Accessed: Jul. 08, 2026. [Online].
(8) EMVCo, “EMV Code Specification for Payment Systems (EMV QRCPS) - Merchant-Presented Mode,” EMVCo, LLC, Technical Standard, Nov. 2020.
(9) EMVCo, “EMV Code Specification for Payment Systems (EMV QRCPS) - Consumer-Presented Mode,” EMVCo, LLC, Technical Standard 1.1, Nov. 2020.
(10) ITU-T, “Information technology – ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER),” https://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/X.690-0207.pdf , Recommendation X.690, Feb. 2007. Accessed: Jul. 08, 2026. [Online].
(11) V. Fong, “The Payment Rails You Use Every Day Are Being Rebuilt - June 2026 Fintech Wrap.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/payment-rails-you-use-every-day-being-rebuilt-june-2026-fong-nzecc , Jul. 2026, Accessed: Jul. 08, 2026. [Online].
(12) BSP, “Circular No. 1055 Series of 2019 - Adoption of a National Quick Response (QR) Code Standard,” Office Of The Governor, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Memorandum, Oct. 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.bsp.gov.ph/Regulations/Issuances/2019/c1055.pdf.
Copyright Sources
P. Lipiridis, “flag-icons: Free Country Flags in SVG.” https://flagicons.lipis.dev , Apr. 2025, Accessed: Apr. 16, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://flagicons.lipis.dev.