What is QR Payment?

Capturing the QR code for payment in Vietnam

Paying for your purchases has become easier through the wide adoption of QR Code payment, especially for us folks living in Southeast Asia. This is another form of cashless payment that bank czars across the region is heavily promoting.
How do you make payment? If you have a bank account, you simply open up the scan tool on your bank app, capture the QR code on display, and click pay. It's as simple as that. 
While QR code payment is a form of cashless payment, to differentiate it from credit card payments, it's also been often referred to as instant payment.
All the countries in Southeast Asia is adopting this form of instant payment, largely from post-pandemic practice, and this serves the economy well. Since the introduction of VietQR in Vietnam back in 2021, there's been a near total adoption by businesses in major cities such as Hanoi, HCMC, and Danang. 
Countries in this region are also forming their bilateral acceptance of cross-border instant payment, such as SGQR (Singapore) with Indonesia's QRIS, Thailand's PromptPay, and Malaysia's DuitNow, where account holders of these latter 3 countries can seamlessly pay with their bank app in Singapore, and vice-versa. Most recently, Vietnam and Cambodia have entered into a similar agreement. 
What about tourists and travelers coming to Southeast Asia? Unfortunately, for the moment, they can only either exchange for local cash or use their credit cards. There is hope though, as LocalPay is set up for this very purpose. As I'm writing this, Malaysia's PayNet has gotten onto this bandwagon. 
As Instant Payment become more prevalent across Southeast Asia, I foresee more collaborations from the likes of Alipay and WeChat (already the pioneers and biggest instant payment players), forming a pact with the region's RPC pact, or Regional Payment Connectivity. India already has its own system known as UPI and this likely will be subsumed into the collaboration. 
Should this instant payment take off, by now it's no longer regional but Asia-wide, Europe will participate through their own standards, and eventually, the USA. It may take a few more years but QR code payment will become the 3rd payment rail. 
With the exception of Alipay and WeChat, the movement is initiated by state banks of these countries. When payments happen, there's a direct currency exchange instead of using the US dollar as a common denominator for the exchange. This allows for lower exchange rate applied for the users. When you use instant payment, more local businesses benefit since these shops may not accept credit cards, and for those that do, it means reducing the transaction fee (around 2.5% and more) which can amount to a substantial amount for small businesses. 
Visa and MasterCard, and other similar card membership programs, are feeling the heat, perhaps not at a global level, certainly at the local level, where they're looking to integrate with payment players. 
This is an interesting time we're living in. In the very near future, payments will be one integrated platform, and the movement of people will be very much eased. 
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