Cross Border

Most, maybe all, countries in South East Asia have their own national QR code standard which is usually based on the EMV merchant-presented QR standard (for instance, Cambodia (1), Singapore (2) or Vietnam (3).

The Philippines, where the standard is called QRPh, is no exception. However, as far as I know, neither the QR code part nor the backend processing part of the QRPh standard are in the public domain.

But since the QR codes out there can be analyzed based on the EMV standard, and the backend processing can be inferred from press releases and other public sources, we know quite a bit about it.

In the next couple of posts on my blog, I will look at the QR code format, the user experience, the backend processing and the EMV underpinnings.

In my last blog post on QR cross-border payments, I was wondering what it would take to build cross-border payment systems in Asia. My opinion was that one of the driving factors for cross-border payments for the Central banks would be to avoid a repeat of the quasi-monopoly that Visa, MasterCard and other international payment schemes enjoy.

I am therefore not surprised that the rapid growth of QR account-to-account payments and the rather sluggish uptake of traditional card payments outside the main cities of the emerging South-East Asian economies would spure Visa into action.

In a (1) published by PR News on November 6, 2024, Visa announced that they would enable cross-border payments at QR merchants, starting in Singapore.

In this article, I am speculating how such cross-border payments may actually be done. I have no direct knowledge or sources other than the Internet. However, I am trying to provide a reason for any assumption I am making.