Indonesia

QRIS has compressed three decades of card-network scaling into six years

Bank Indonesia launched QRIS in August 2019 as a single, interoperable QR standard across banks, e-money wallets and merchant acquirers. By end-2024 it had 34m registered merchants — versus 1.3m card-accepting merchants in 2019 — and processed 5.1bn transactions in a single year. 90% of QRIS merchants are MSMEs; 60% of QRIS merchants had no prior card-acceptance relationship.

QRIS cross-border interoperability is live with five ASEAN neighbours

Bank Indonesia and partner central banks have connected QRIS to Thai PromptPay, Singapore NETS, Malaysia DuitNow, Vietnam NAPAS and Philippines QR Ph since the ASEAN QR interoperability framework went live in 2022-24. An inbound Thai tourist can pay a Jakarta merchant by scanning QRIS from a Thai bank app at domestic FX rates; volumes remain small (~US$280m in 2024) but the corridor architecture is live and expanding to Japan and Korea in 2026.

BI-FAST has displaced the legacy SKNBI retail clearing house

BI-FAST — Bank Indonesia's 24/7/365 instant retail rail launched December 2021 — now processes over 1.9bn transactions a year, with fees capped at Rp2,500 per transfer (versus Rp6,500 on the legacy SKNBI system). 130 participating banks. Bank Indonesia has publicly signalled SKNBI will be deprecated before 2030 with BI-FAST as the single retail rail. PayLater and BNPL providers are already BI-FAST-native at the settlement layer.

QRIS MDR is capped at 0.3% for micro-merchants and 0.7% for regular merchants by Bank Indonesia regulation. Issuer and acquirer banks split a narrow take-rate. Ant-backed DANA and Shopee-backed ShopeePay have used scale economics on the issuer side to monetise via credit upsell, not MDR; incumbent banks (BCA, BRI, Mandiri) are investing heavily in QRIS-native POS software to defend the merchant relationship.

Since the Gojek-Tokopedia merger formed GoTo in 2021, and Grab's acquisition of OVO took it to 70% stake in 2022, the Indonesian wallet market has been through a consolidation phase. GoPay, ShopeePay, DANA, OVO and LinkAja command roughly 80% of e-money volume; TikTok Shop's 2023 Tokopedia acquisition added yet another distribution channel. A further round of M&A — with LinkAja the most likely target — could concentrate share further.

The ASEAN cross-border QR framework (ID+TH+SG+MY+VN+PH) routes at central-bank-to-central-bank FX rates cheaper than card scheme cross-border interchange. Tourism volume on the Thailand-Indonesia corridor grew 380% in 2024 to US$145m. PSPs that integrate tourism-loyalty + currency-optimisation over QRIS cross-border capture a structurally attractive inbound corridor.