Mapping ASEAN's digital payment rails: Speed, control, and who's actually using them.

Cambodia's Bakong runs almost entirely on phones that have never been inside a bank branch. Thailand's PromptPay moves US$1.5 trillion a year. Singapore's PayNow, live for almost a decade, is now accepted at roughly 350,000 businesses. Every one of the ten rails is run by a central bank, a bank consortium, or an entity licensed and supervised by one.

Digital account ownership, all ten countries

Brunei and Myanmar aren't shown: neither has a comparable account-ownership figure published.

This piece maps all ten: how fast each rail settles, who's actually holding an account able to reach it, and who controls the infrastructure underneath. Pick a country below for its whole story, or scroll down to compare all ten side by side.

Southeast Asia's digital payment rails

Widely served (80%+) Majority served (50-79%) Largely excluded (under 50%) No ownership data

Select a country above.

Singapore

PayNow

Widely served

Account ownership: 98% own an account. World Bank Findex indicator, 2024 fieldwork: the highest account ownership of the ten, in a market where instant payment adoption is near-universal too.
Everyday acceptance: Used by 90%+ of residents, accepted at ~350,000 businesses. Figure for 2025, per MAS’s own PayNow Gen2 report. Hawker stalls show the clearest ratio: over 11,500 of roughly 13,430 licensed stalls now take e-payment, per NETS, Enterprise Singapore figures from October 2024.
Value moved/yr: S$301bn processed domestically in 2025 (roughly US$224bn), per MAS’s own PayNow Gen2 report.
Online checkout: A minority checkout method. PayNow is live on Shopee and Amazon.sg via licensed gateways, but accounted for only about 9% of e-commerce payment value in 2026 versus 73% for cards (2C2P/IDC).
Settlement speed: Real-time by design, no exact time published. MAS: domestic transfers settle "a matter of seconds," 24/7. No exact figure published.
Cost per transfer: Free for merchants, per DPM Gan Kim Yong’s own parliamentary reply, apart from a small fee for add-ons like payment notifications, which an anti-surcharge rule bars merchants from passing to customers. Singapore Pools kept charging one anyway, predating the rule, before agreeing to absorb the surcharge itself in November 2025.
Cash trend: Currency in circulation rising in nominal terms. Currency in circulation hit an all-time high of S$65.5bn (~US$51.4bn) in January 2025 (MAS, via CEIC). ATM withdrawal value (S$55bn, ~US$43.2bn, in 2024) still exceeded debit-card spending that year.
Rail operator: ABS has owned PayNow since 2017, and is folding into a new joint entity, SPaN, giving MAS a seat running the rail for the first time. Since October 2025, a joint SPF-MAS-IMDA-GovTech framework restricts digital banking for flagged money mules, cutting off PayNow access too. A November 2025 operation froze over 180 accounts and seized S$486,000 in under a month.

The rail, in brief

PayNow exists to solve a specific, dated problem. At its 2017 launch, MAS framed it as cutting settlement from “2 to 3 working days” down to “a matter of seconds.” MAS and the bank association ABS are now folding PayNow’s governance into a new joint entity, Singapore Payments Network, incorporated mid-2025, the first time the regulator itself gets a seat running the rail rather than just overseeing it from outside.

How fast this moved

2017 Banks launch PayNow.

Live from 10 July 2017. MAS’s own framing: FAST reduces settlement to “a matter of seconds from the 2 to 3 working days” of a traditional transfer.
2021 Extended to non-bank payment institutions.

From 8 February 2021, licensed payment institutions (not just banks) could offer PayNow to their customers directly.
Apr 2021 First cross-border link goes live, PayNow-PromptPay with Thailand, the world’s first such linkage.

Mobile-number based, capped at S$1,000 or THB25,000 a day, roughly US$770 either way, the same cross-border limit quoted in each side’s own currency.
2023 PayNow-DuitNow link with Malaysia goes live, in two phases.

Merchant QR first (31 March 2023), then P2P account-to-account (17 November 2023), capped at S$1,000 or MYR3,000 a day, roughly US$760 either way. MAS’s own framing: the first such linkage anywhere to include non-bank financial institutions on both sides, naming TNG Digital, operator of Malaysia’s Touch ’n Go eWallet, as one of the participants alongside the banks on both sides.
Jun 2025 MAS and ABS incorporate a new joint entity, SPaN, folding PayNow’s governance in for the first time.

Members are MAS plus Singapore’s domestically systemically important banks, targeted operational by end-2026, MAS’s first formal seat at the table, though still bank-controlled rather than central-bank-run.
Nov 2025 Singapore Pools agrees to stop surcharging PayNow transactions, after years of charging customers 10 cents each.

The 10-cent fee predated ABS’s anti-surcharge rule, which took effect in March 2024 without applying retroactively, so it continued unaddressed until MP Alex Yeo raised it in Parliament that October. Singapore Pools defended the fee as recovering processing costs under its own contracts with partner banks; it agreed to absorb the fee itself from 11 November 2025.

Regulators & terms

PayNow PayNow: Singapore’s real-time retail transfer rail, live since July 2017. Owned by the bank association ABS, now co-governed with MAS through SPaN.
MAS Monetary Authority of Singapore: Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator, now co-governing PayNow through SPaN, its first formal seat running the rail rather than just overseeing it.
ABS Association of Banks in Singapore: The bank association that has owned and run PayNow since its 2017 launch, alongside MAS since the SPaN entity’s 2025 incorporation.
SPaN Singapore Payments Network: The joint entity MAS and ABS incorporated in mid-2025 to govern PayNow together, targeted operational by end-2026.

Malaysia

DuitNow

Widely served

Account ownership: 89% own an account. World Bank Findex indicator, 2024 fieldwork, up slightly from 88% in 2021.
Everyday acceptance: 2.6 million registered DuitNow QR points, almost 3 million by end-2025. Bank Negara Malaysia’s own figures. A separate rural programme, e-Duit Desa, brought over 800 micro-merchants onto e-payment in 2024 alone.
Value moved/yr: DuitNow QR alone moved RM31.1bn (~US$7.6bn) in 2024, up from RM14.6bn (~US$3.59bn) in 2023 (BNM Annual Report 2024). That covers only QR transactions, not DuitNow’s P2P transfer volume, which BNM has never broken out separately.
Online checkout: Through a separate rail, once called FPX and now DuitNow Online Banking/Wallet. DuitNow QR itself is architecturally in-person only, per PayNet’s own documentation. Online checkout runs on a distinct, well-established bank-transfer product, mid-transition to a new interface (DOBW) as of 2025 (Maybank).
Settlement speed: Real-time by design, no exact time published. Instant for a user since DuitNow’s December 2018 launch, but the backend only became genuinely real-time-settled with RENTAS+ on 7 Oct 2025. Before that, deferred net settlement, twice daily.
Cost per transfer: Free for consumer P2P transfers. QR merchant MDR 0.25-0.5%, waived for businesses under RM15mn in annual turnover (BNM). The rate is set by individual banks, not PayNet centrally, and enforcement is uneven: Maybank and Public Bank both kept waiving it for every merchant anyway. No minimum transaction size applies.
Cash trend: Currency in circulation rising every year without exception. Nominal currency in circulation has risen every year since 2020 (Department of Statistics Malaysia). No currency-to-GDP ratio or ATM-usage trend has ever been published.
Rail operator: Bank Negara Malaysia holds a 35.5% equity stake in PayNet, alongside 11 banks, and plans to gradually reduce it. Malaysia’s National Scam Response Centre identified 87,209 mule accounts in 2025, up 70% from 2024, freezing RM2.408bn in January 2026 alone, though only 13% reached victims. DuitNow’s irrevocable design means recovery relies on freezing funds before they move again.

The rail, in brief

DuitNow was built to end a real fragmentation cost. Before DuitNow, merchants paid to maintain multiple QR acceptance points, consumers spread their money across competing apps, and new entrants couldn’t reach customers locked into a rival’s closed network. PayNet unified all of that under one national standard in 2018.

DuitNow’s backend only became genuinely real-time in October 2025, when RENTAS+ replaced a twice-daily settlement batch banks had been running quietly behind an “instant” interface for years. Bank Negara Malaysia, the rail’s largest shareholder, has already announced plans to reduce that stake.

How fast this moved

Dec 2018 DuitNow launches nationwide, PayNet’s real-time retail-transfer rail.

PayNet’s own corporate history dates it to 2018; Bernama and the New Straits Times reported the December launch two months ahead, describing a transfer service keyed to mobile numbers and identity-card numbers rather than bank account numbers.
2022 DuitNow QR reaches 125 million transactions, RM5.5bn.
Nov 2023 PayNet ends its blanket MDR waiver on DuitNow QR merchants, in place since 2019, on 1 November. Businesses under RM15mn turnover keep the waiver.

PayNet stressed the change was unrelated to a separate 50 sen (~US$0.12) fee on personal transfers above RM5,000 (~US$1,230), never charged to merchants. Banks and acquirers set the MDR themselves, reported around 0.25%, and Maybank and Public Bank both kept waiving it for their own merchants regardless.
2024 DuitNow QR reaches 870 million transactions, RM31.1bn.
Oct 2025 RENTAS+ launches, making interbank settlement genuinely real-time for the first time.

BNM’s own words describe the deferred net settlement it replaced as carrying “inherent credit and settlement risks.” RENTAS+ is the first real-time gross settlement system in ASEAN to run round-the-clock.
Dec 2025 BNM confirmed as planning to reduce its 35.5% PayNet stake.

Framed around “enhancing market competitiveness and strengthening industry leadership,” per the Ministry of Finance’s own parliamentary reply, with no target percentage or timeline given yet.

Regulators & terms

DuitNow DuitNow: Malaysia’s real-time retail transfer rail, operated by PayNet since December 2018.
BNM Bank Negara Malaysia: Malaysia’s central bank; holds 35.5% of PayNet alongside 11 commercial banks, and has already announced plans to reduce that stake.
PayNet Payments Network Malaysia: The bank consortium that operates DuitNow, majority-owned by 11 banks alongside BNM’s own minority stake.

Brunei

tarus

No ownership data

Account ownership: Brunei has never been surveyed for account ownership by the World Bank, in any year, not just this round, confirmed directly against the World Bank’s own methodology, which lists every ASEAN country actually surveyed.
Everyday acceptance: No merchant count published yet. tarusQR only went nationwide in February 2026. Brunei’s two largest banks, BIBD proper and Baiduri, still aren’t onboarded to tarus itself.
Value moved/yr: No published transaction-volume figure found.
Online checkout: Only through card gateways, not tarus. Brunei’s actual online-payment infrastructure is bank-issued card gateways (Baiduri, BIBD) accepting Visa/Mastercard/UnionPay directly. tarusQR itself has no online role at all, in-person only so far.
Settlement speed: Real-time by design, no exact time published. tarus’s own FAQ: transfers happen "within just a few seconds," qualitative, no numeric SLA.
Cost per transfer: Free during an undated introductory phase, explicitly subject to future review (tarus FAQ).
Cash trend: Currency in circulation cleanly declining. Both gross and active currency in circulation fell every year from 2021 to 2025 (Brunei Statistical Yearbook), alongside a falling ATM count, while tarusQR only reached the public in February 2026, with no merchant data published yet. Cards may be filling part of that gap, per Baiduri Bank’s own 2025 annual report: overall card spending grew 11.3% that year, debit usage alone up 15.6%.
Rail operator: ndpx’s shareholders are Darussalam Assets, Brunei’s state holding company, plus Baiduri Bank, BIBD, and TAIB, chaired by a Ministry of Finance and Economy official. Baiduri and BIBD hold a stake in tarus yet haven’t onboarded their own customers to it. BDCB is itself government-owned, chaired by the Minister of Finance, not independent, and no evidence of a tarus-specific freeze or restriction was found.

The rail, in brief

tarus exists to fix a specific gap: before it, ordinary Bruneians could only move money easily between accounts at the same bank or e-wallet, with cross-bank transfers stuck on the Real-Time Gross Settlement System, built for large payments rather than routine use. It wasn’t built to defend a currency, though: Brunei’s own dollar has been pegged 1:1 to the Singapore dollar since a 1967 bilateral agreement neither side has ever needed to renegotiate.

ndpx, the state-linked operator behind tarus, launched the rail barely 18 months ago, and its own launch participant list still doesn’t include Brunei’s two largest banks, BIBD and Baiduri, a gap between formal launch and actual market coverage that the rail has yet to close.

How fast this moved

Nov 2022 ndpx incorporated, per Brunei’s own corporate registry.

ndpx (registration number RC30000209) is registered at Level 5 of the Ministry of Finance and Economy, literally domiciled inside the ministry building it answers to, about as close as an operator gets to sitting inside government itself without being the central bank.
Feb 2024 BDCB signs the Regional Payment Connectivity MOU.
May 2024 The Digital Payment Hub integrates with BDCB’s own Real-Time Gross Settlement system, enabling seamless settlement of instant payments.

Built on a regulatory assessment BDCB conducted in 2023, per the Central Bank’s own 2024 Annual Report. The integration is credited with reducing settlement risk ahead of tarus’s public launch the following March.
Mar 2025 tarus launches for peer-to-peer transfers.

Initial participants: BEEP Solutions, BIBD At-Tamwil’s “Olive” e-wallet, MyDST, TAIBVX, and Progresif’s Ding! ndpx’s own launch statement names Baiduri, BIBD proper, and ThreeG Media’s Pocket as “expected to join in the next phase.”
Feb 2026 tarusQR goes live nationwide, 21 February.

Live at launch through just three apps, Progresif Ding!, MyDST, and TAIBVX; BIBD and Baiduri, Brunei’s two largest banks, still aren’t among them.

Regulators & terms

tarus Brunei’s national instant-payment rail: ndpx’s peer-to-peer transfer product, launched March 2025. A lowercase brand name by the operator’s own styling, not an acronym.
BDCB Brunei Darussalam Central Bank: Brunei’s central bank; signed the Regional Payment Connectivity MOU on the country’s behalf in 2024.
ndpx National Digital Payments Network Sdn Bhd: The state-linked joint venture that builds and runs Brunei’s payment rails, registered inside the Ministry of Finance and Economy itself. Styled in lowercase by the company’s own branding, not an acronym.

Thailand

PromptPay

Widely served

Account ownership: 92% own an account. World Bank Global Findex 2025, among the highest in the region.
Everyday acceptance: 987,000 merchants registered under one stimulus scheme. No BOT or NITMX merchant count exists at all; the clearest figures instead trace to two 2024-2025 government schemes that specifically required street-vendor and market-stall QR sign-up.
Value moved/yr: PromptPay processed 27.4 billion transactions worth US$1.6tn in 2025, per Bank of Thailand data, up 12.8% year-on-year. A single month, November 2025, alone moved ฿4.19tn (NITMX).
Online checkout: Entirely through licensed gateways. BOT and NITMX publish no merchant API; checkout runs through licensed gateways instead. Opn Payments, formerly Omise, charges merchants 1.65% to generate a PromptPay QR at checkout, versus 3.65% for cards, a real cost on an otherwise near-free rail. PromptPay took 26% of e-commerce payment value in 2026, versus 24% for cards (2C2P/IDC).
Settlement speed: Settles in "seconds," per secondary sources, with a stated maximum of 60 seconds for interbank settlement, though no BOT document in English or Thai publishes an exact figure.
Cost per transfer: Free for transfers up to THB5,000 (~US$152); above that, a fee of THB2-10 (US$0.06-0.30) applies, though many banks have waived it entirely since 2018 (BOT).
Cash trend: Cash use falling for consumers, rising for large transfers. Cash’s share of point-of-sale value fell from 63% to 54% (2021-2023) and ATM withdrawals keep declining, but Bank of Thailand’s own data shows branch cash withdrawals over 1 million baht (~US$30,400) have reversed course and are rising again, presumed precautionary hoarding.
Rail operator: NITMX is wholly owned by its member banks, operating under the Bank of Thailand’s oversight. Since August 2024, a shared Central Fraud Registry lets any bank suspend a flagged customer’s electronic banking, PromptPay included, across every bank they use. Nearly 75% of Thais worry their own account could freeze without notice.

The rail, in brief

PromptPay wasn’t a bank consortium’s idea. It’s the first of five pillars in Thailand’s National e-Payment Master Plan, approved by the Cabinet on 22 December 2015 on the Ministry of Finance’s own submission, aimed at pushing the country toward a digital, less cash-dependent economy, alongside modernizing tax collection and welfare payouts.

NITMX, PromptPay’s bank-owned operator, links the rail to more foreign economies than any other in this research, ten in total, from Cambodia to Japan to China, including a live corridor with Laos. Merchant QR fees, though, appear genuinely unregulated by direct Bank of Thailand rate-setting, set bank-by-bank instead.

How fast this moved

Jan 2017 PromptPay opens to the public, a month after its first live transactions disbursed government child-support payments.

Interbank credit transfers opened to the general public on 27 January 2017, per the World Bank’s own case study; PromptPay had already carried its first live transactions in December 2016, disbursing government child-support payments.
Apr–Jun 2024 Cross-border QR link with Laos goes live, in two phases.

Phase 1 (3 April 2024): Lao users scan Thai PromptPay QR. Phase 2 (end June 2024): the reverse. Settlement runs through KBank on the Thai side and BCEL on the Lao side, 2 Thai banks and 6 Lao banks in total. BOT’s own governor called it “the sixth linkage under the ASEAN Payment Connectivity initiative.”
Aug 2024 A shared Central Fraud Registry lets any bank suspend a flagged customer’s electronic banking, PromptPay included, across every bank at once.

Part of a mule-account crackdown that has frozen over 1.66 million accounts since 2023. A September 2025 Suan Dusit Poll of 1,154 respondents found nearly 75% worried their own account could freeze without notice, and some said theirs was frozen entirely despite officials’ insistence that only flagged transactions, not whole accounts, get suspended.
Jul 2026 Bank of Thailand’s own BAHTNET Modernization paper reveals PromptPay’s capacity has reached roughly 95 million transactions a day.

This is a stated system-capacity figure, not a single calendar-day record. NITMX’s own dated monthly releases separately report actual peak-day counts ranging 68.51 million to 107.44 million across different months (Feb 2025–Jul 2026), a real spread across a year, not a contradiction of BOT’s capacity claim.

Regulators & terms

PromptPay PromptPay: Thailand’s real-time retail transfer rail, live for public use since January 2017. Operated by NITMX under Bank of Thailand oversight.
BOT Bank of Thailand: Thailand’s central bank; oversees PromptPay without itself holding an ownership stake in NITMX, the bank-owned company that runs it.
NITMX National ITMX Co., Ltd.: The bank-owned company that operates PromptPay, under Bank of Thailand oversight.

Laos

LAPNet

Largely excluded

Account ownership: 38% own an account. Findex 2025, bank and mobile money combined. About 62% remain excluded from any account. The Asian Development Bank Institute ties this mainly to poor internet access and low financial literacy, not a lack of appetite for digital rails specifically.
Everyday acceptance: No merchant count exists anywhere. Bank of Laos’s own annual report and its statistics pages give no merchant or acceptance-point figure at all, a real evidentiary hole rather than a data point simply not yet found.
Value moved/yr: No published transaction-volume figure found. Kip makes up only about half of Laos’s money stock, with Thai baht at roughly 30% and US dollars 20% (ADB Institute), yet LAPNet and Lao QR settle in kip only, leaving a large share of the cash economy structurally outside the rail.
Online checkout: Technically exists, but no confirmed real-world use. BCEL, Laos’s largest state-owned bank, runs Laos’s only e-commerce gateway: international cards and Alipay/WeChat Pay, not LAPNet or Lao QR, at 3%+ per transaction plus a flat US$45/month fee. No named merchant confirmed to use it, and no recognizable online marketplace operates in Laos. Shopee and Lazada don’t deliver there; local shopping runs through informal Facebook and TikTok seller groups.
Settlement speed: No settlement-time evidence published. LAPNet has never published a settlement-time figure, across the full archived history of its own site.
Cost per transfer: From 1,000 kip (~US$0.05) for transfers up to 2,000,000 kip (~US$100), tiered up to 40,000 kip (~US$2) for the largest band. LAPNet’s own fee schedule, published 2021-2024 then quietly removed (Wayback Machine).
Cash trend: A cash uptick, not a resurgence. Cash’s share of the broader money supply (M2) ticked up off a 2023 low but remains below 2021 levels, while ATM withdrawal value kept falling through 2025 (Bank of Laos).
Rail operator: LAPNet is a joint venture of the Bank of Laos and 14 commercial banks. Its silence on basic figures matches a wider pattern researchers have documented. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index describes Laos’s state bureaucracy as suffering from “a lack of resources, transparency and capacity” broadly, not just in payments.

The rail, in brief

Laos runs a genuinely multi-currency economy: the kip makes up only about half its money stock, Thai baht roughly 30% and US dollars 20% (ADB Institute). The mark shown here is Lao QR, the standard riding on LAPNet, which itself has no separate public identity. It once published a real fee schedule for three years, then quietly removed it sometime after 2024, a rare case of transparency going backward.

How fast this moved

Dec 2020 LAPNet’s mobile money transfer app launches, the joint venture’s first live product.

Live from 8 December 2020, per jclao.com’s own reporting from the launch ceremony, attended by the Governor of the Bank of the Lao PDR: two banks (Lao Development Bank, ST Bank) handled QR transfers at launch, with five more (BCEL, LDB, BIC Bank, Lao-Viet Joint Venture Bank, Joint Development Bank) handling account-to-account transfers.
2021–2024 LAPNet publishes a numeric fee schedule for its mobile-transfer product, before quietly removing it.

The fee-schedule page was live from 7 December 2021 through 7 October 2024, before disappearing sometime in early 2026, the same site redesign that also dropped LAPNet’s English-language version entirely.
Apr 2024 Laos joins the Regional Payment Connectivity MOU.
Jan 2025 Laos-Vietnam QR link launches, one-directional, Vietnam scans Laos and not yet the reverse.

Vietnamese customers can scan LaoQR at Lao merchants, with real-time LAK/VND conversion, built on NAPAS-LAPNet connectivity dating to 2023. 7 Vietnamese banks and 14 Lao banks participate.
2026 Bank of Laos’s own annual report confirms the Vietnam link is still one-directional, while the separate Laos-Cambodia link has reached its second, reciprocal phase.

BOL’s own numbered list of the year’s cross-border achievements states, for Laos-Vietnam, only “Phase 1 (Vietnam scans Laos),” while the identical list reports Laos-Cambodia at “Phase 2 (Laos scans Cambodia).” Since BOL does report Phase 2 completions when they happen, its silence on Laos-Vietnam’s is itself the evidence the reciprocal leg hadn’t launched.

Regulators & terms

LAPNet Lao National Payment Network Co., Ltd.: The state-bank joint venture operating Laos’s mobile-transfer rail, launched December 2020, alongside 14 commercial banks.
BOL Bank of the Lao PDR: Laos’s central bank; holds a joint-venture stake in LAPNet alongside 14 commercial banks.

Vietnam

NAPAS 247

Majority served

Account ownership: 71% own an account. World Bank Findex indicator, 2024 fieldwork, up sharply from 56% in 2022, the fastest inclusion gain of any country in this research.
Everyday acceptance: 741,000+ POS/mPOS devices, informal reach unclear. NAPAS publishes this count on its own site without a stated date, so how current it is unclear. It also leaves out the informal market: chợ 4.0, the dedicated street-market cashless programme, hasn’t published a national count since 2022, when it covered around 30,000 small traders.
Value moved/yr: 8.9 billion NAPAS 247 transfers in 2024 (NAPAS), though no value figure specific to the 247 service exists.
Online checkout: Actively expanding. NAPAS itself signed a direct deal with TikTok Shop in July 2026 to deploy checkout through its own platform, on top of an established VNPay/OnePay/Payoo gateway ecosystem. Domestic bank transfer took 29% of e-commerce payment value in 2026, tied closely with cards and e-wallets at 30% each (2C2P/IDC).
Settlement speed: NAPAS’s own deputy general director, quoted live at the 2021 launch event: transfers complete "within 1 second." A dated, unrepeated executive quote, not a current published SLA.
Cost per transfer: NAPAS waives its own wholesale fee for transfers under 500,000 VND (~US$19) and all VietQR transfers; most retail banks advertise free. Some foreign-owned banks still charge: HSBC charges 5,500 VND (~US$0.21) per NAPAS 247 transfer, versus zero at domestic banks like Techcombank and Timo.
Cash trend: Cash signals pulling in opposite directions. Cash’s share of the broader money supply (M2) hit a three-year high in January 2026, tied to a tax-policy-driven shift among small traders (SBV, via CafeF), while NAPAS’s own data shows ATM withdrawals falling 29% that same year.
Rail operator: The State Bank of Vietnam holds a 49% equity stake in NAPAS, alongside 15 banks. That bank’s own biometric-verification mandate saw commercial banks delete or freeze over 86 million accounts, over 40% of the country’s total, from September 2025. A further deadline from 1 January 2026 suspends banking for unverified accounts, cutting off NAPAS 247 and VietQR too.

The rail, in brief

NAPAS exists to fix the same kind of problem Malaysia’s DuitNow later solved. Before its 2016 merger of two rival card-switching networks, Banknetvn and Smartlink, a card issued through one couldn’t be used at the other’s ATMs or POS terminals without extra fees, a merger directed by the Prime Minister and the State Bank of Vietnam itself.

The mark shown here is VietQR, NAPAS’s own consumer-facing QR brand. NAPAS remains the one rail in this research where the central bank holds a disclosed equity stake, 49%, confirmed directly on the company’s own corporate timeline.

How fast this moved

2016 NAPAS is formed from a merger of Banknetvn and Smartlink; the State Bank of Vietnam raises its stake to 49% the same year.

Up from an initial stake of roughly 25% in 2010, per NAPAS’s own corporate timeline page; the remainder is held by 15 major Vietnamese commercial banks.
Jun 2021 NAPAS 247/VietQR launches, with a NAPAS executive quoted claiming transfers complete within 1 second.

NAPAS Deputy General Director Nguyễn Đăng Hùng, quoted live at the 15 June 2021 launch event by Tuổi Trẻ, a dated, unrepeated executive quote, not a current published SLA; NAPAS’s own product pages today describe the service only as “real-time.”
Aug 2023 Vietnam joins Regional Payment Connectivity.
Jan 2025 Laos-Vietnam QR link launches.

Vietnamese customers can scan LaoQR at Lao merchants, the same mechanism as the Laos side, with real-time LAK/VND conversion across 7 Vietnamese banks and 14 Lao banks. The reverse, Lao customers scanning VietQR, hadn’t launched yet.
Sep 2025 SBV orders commercial banks to delete or freeze over 86 million bank accounts lacking biometric verification.

Framed by the State Bank of Vietnam as a fraud-prevention “system cleanup” under Circular 17/2024/TT-NHNN, affecting mostly dormant accounts out of roughly 200 million total. A further deadline, from 1 January 2026, suspends online and mobile banking, including NAPAS 247 and VietQR, for any account still unverified.
Jul 2026 NAPAS signs a direct deal with TikTok Shop to deploy checkout through its own platform.

Checkout runs through NAPAS’s own Digital Payment Platform, supporting “NAPAS cards, payment accounts from 44 banks, and VietQR.”

Regulators & terms

NAPAS 247 NAPAS 247: NAPAS’s real-time retail transfer service, launched June 2021 with a claimed one-second settlement time.
SBV State Bank of Vietnam: Vietnam’s central bank; holds a disclosed 49% equity stake in NAPAS, the only rail operator in this research with a stated central-bank ownership share.
NAPAS National Payment Corporation of Vietnam: The bank consortium operating NAPAS 247 and VietQR, formed in 2016 from a merger of Banknetvn and Smartlink.

Indonesia

BI-FAST

Largely excluded

Account ownership: 49% own an account. Findex 2025, up 13 points since 2021, with gender parity in account access.
Everyday acceptance: 40 million QRIS merchants, 93% of them UMKM small businesses. Bank Indonesia’s own figure, as of August 2025. One traditional market, Pasar Banyuasri in Bali, found a starker reality: only 32 of 1,200 registered traders actually used it.
Value moved/yr: Rp8,554.2tn (~US$525bn) moved through BI-FAST in Jan-Sep 2025 (BI, via Kontan), annualized to roughly Rp11,406tn/yr (US$700bn/yr).
Online checkout: Mainly through bank virtual accounts, not QRIS directly. Most real online checkout runs on bank-issued virtual accounts (a merchant-specific number the customer transfers to), not through QRIS itself. QRIS’s own 2022 extension for remote payment is a manual “no face-to-face” mode, sharing a QR image for the buyer to type the amount into, suited to social-commerce, not an embedded checkout button.
Settlement speed: Real-time by design, no exact time published. Bank Indonesia’s own release says BI-FAST settles "real time," 24/7, with no exact seconds figure given.
Cost per transfer: Capped at Rp2,500 per transfer by Bank Indonesia itself (US$0.16).
Cash trend: Currency in circulation rising at a sustained double-digit pace. Currency in circulation grew roughly 13-16% annually through 2024-2025 (Bank Indonesia), even as ATM terminal count fell by over 12,000 machines since 2019.
Rail operator: BI-FAST is operated directly by the central bank, with no intermediary layer at all. OJK has coordinated bank freezes of over 33,000 gambling-linked accounts since 2024. Banks freeze for police too, without a court order: Bank Mandiri froze a protest organizer’s account before August 2026 demonstrations, which Amnesty International Indonesia called a restriction on the right to protest.

The rail, in brief

The mark shown here is QRIS, Indonesia’s QR standard, though the rest of this profile tracks BI-FAST, the transfer rail underneath it. Bank Indonesia’s own materials frame it as the backbone of a broader digital-economy push, though BI has never directly explained why it chose to run the rail entirely by itself, with no consortium or licensed operator standing in between, the model every other country in this research uses instead.

How fast this moved

Aug 2019 QRIS is introduced as Indonesia’s national QR standard.

A joint initiative of Bank Indonesia and the Indonesian Payment System Association (ASPI), 17 August 2019.
Dec 2021 BI-FAST launches as central-bank-run settlement infrastructure.

Real-time, 24/7, capped at Rp250mn (~US$15,600) a transaction, a ceiling BI itself describes as “subject to periodic review.”
2022–2026 QRIS’s cross-border program (antarnegara) expands to six countries, from Thailand first to China and South Korea most recently.

Thailand (Aug 2022), Malaysia (May 2023), Singapore (Nov 2023), Japan (Aug 2025), South Korea (Apr 2026), China (Apr 2026, Alipay only so far; WeChat Pay and UnionPay not yet included). Inbound use by foreign visitors far exceeds outbound: 5.89 million versus 1.68 million transactions in 2025.
Aug 2025 QRIS crosses 40 million merchants, 93% of them UMKM.

A separate BI figure for the same period puts UMKM at 67% of total QRIS “users” rather than 93%. The 93% figure is UMKM’s share of merchants specifically; the 67% figure is a broader user count that appears to include consumers alongside merchants, a distinction BI’s own press materials don’t state explicitly.

Regulators & terms

BI-FAST BI-FAST: Bank Indonesia’s own real-time settlement infrastructure, launched December 2021, the one rail in this whole dataset with no intermediary layer at all.
QRIS Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard: Indonesia’s national QR standard, introduced August 2019. The mark shown on this card is QRIS specifically, though BI-FAST is the transfer rail underneath it.
BI Bank Indonesia: Indonesia’s central bank; operates BI-FAST directly, the one rail in this whole dataset with no intermediary layer at all.
ASPI Asosiasi Sistem Pembayaran Indonesia (Indonesian Payment System Association): Co-introduced QRIS alongside Bank Indonesia in August 2019.
UMKM Usaha Mikro, Kecil, dan Menengah (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises): Indonesia’s official classification for small businesses, the category most QRIS merchants fall into.

Philippines

InstaPay

Majority served

Account ownership: 50% own an account. BSP’s own 2025 survey (not Findex): down from 56% in 2021. E-money (36%) now exceeds bank accounts (23%).
Everyday acceptance: PPMI cites 2.5 million merchants, BSP’s own count is still stale. PPMI put the QR Ph ecosystem at roughly 2.5 million merchants and SMEs in a September 2026 partnership announcement, though BSP’s own official aggregate still sits at 20,000+, dated to the October 2021 launch; BSP is now building a national merchant database because no current registry exists. A private survey found GCash in 85% of 2,000+ sari-sari stores.
Value moved/yr: ₱11.554tn moved through InstaPay in 2025 (US$198bn), up 57% from ₱7.347tn in 2024 (US$126bn) (BSP, via BusinessWorld and Inquirer). Overseas Filipino remittances, a separate US$35.63bn inflow in 2025 (7.3% of GDP), arrive through banks, remittance centers, and e-wallet partnerships rather than InstaPay itself.
Online checkout: Purpose-built for checkout. BSP’s own QR Ph rail supports dynamic per-transaction QR at checkout, and GCash exposes its own dedicated online-checkout API distinct from its in-person QR flow. Domestic payments like InstaPay and QR Ph took 24% of e-commerce payment value in 2026, just ahead of cards at 21% and behind digital wallets at 28% (2C2P/IDC).
Settlement speed: Real-time by design, no exact time published. InstaPay is real-time, 24/7, with no published exact settlement time. PESONet, a separate batch-settlement rail, isn’t what’s charted here.
Cost per transfer: Free at major banks since a July 2026 BSP fee-cap circular; ranged ₱5-30 (US$0.09-0.51) before that.
Cash trend: Cash demand declining as digital payments grow. A BSP research paper (2026) modeled this directly and found a statistically significant negative long-run relationship between digital payments and total cash demand, using both bank withdrawals and the currency-to-GDP ratio as measures.
Rail operator: PPMI is a 161-member industry body of banks and e-money issuers, operating under BSP oversight. That oversight reaches beyond settlement mechanics: a single August 2025 BSP memorandum gave every supervised e-wallet and bank 48 hours to cut gambling access. GCash complied by shutting down GLife, its own mini-programs hub that hosted the gambling links, with no return date set.

The rail, in brief

PPMI was created in 2017 under Republic Act 11127 to run the Philippines’ National Retail Payment System, with InstaPay going live the following year as its first product, settling under the QR Ph standard shown here. Since April 2026, Coins.ph lets users pay any of QR Ph’s roughly 700,000 merchants directly in USDT or USDC, converted to pesos at checkout on the same national standard used for every other transaction described here.

How fast this moved

2017 Republic Act 11127 establishes the National Retail Payment System framework; PPMI is created to run it.
Apr 2018 InstaPay launches, the framework’s first live rail.

Live from 23 April 2018, letting customers transfer pesos in near real time between participating BSP-supervised banks and e-money issuers. BSP’s own stated aim was lifting electronic retail payments to at least 20% of transaction volume within two years.
Oct 2021 QR Ph P2M launches nationally.

BSP’s own stated rationale named the informal tier directly: benefits for “small unbanked vendors such as tricycle drivers, market vendors, and sari-sari store owners.”
Dec 2021 A BSP moratorium bars fee increases on InstaPay and PESONet.
Jun 2026 BSP Circular 1238 lifts the moratorium and mandates fair, market-based pricing.

Signed by Governor Eli Remolona Jr., 17 June 2026. Section 2(1)(a) requires pricing that “does not arise from non-competitive agreements... to fix the price”; Section 2(1)(b) requires off-us transfer fees not to “materially differ” from on-us ones. A widely-cited ₱1.50 fee figure does not appear anywhere in the circular’s 6 pages; it traces instead to a separate public statement by Finance Secretary Frederick Go. BSP itself later clarified (31 July 2026) that the circular “is a cost-based fair pricing guideline, not a zero-based mandate.”
Jul 2026 Free transfers take effect at most major Philippine banks within weeks of the circular.

BPI, BDO, LandBank/OFBank, UnionBank, Metrobank, PSBank, Chinabank, Security Bank, PNB, and EastWest all moved to free InstaPay/PESONet transfers rather than raise fees; BSP reported transaction volume up as much as 50% following the shift.

Regulators & terms

InstaPay InstaPay: The Philippines’ real-time retail transfer rail, live since April 2018. Operated by PPMI under BSP oversight.
BSP Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas: The Philippines’ central bank; lifted its own fee moratorium in 2026, after which most major banks moved to free InstaPay transfers within weeks.
PPMI Philippine Payments Management, Inc.: The BSP-recognized body created under Republic Act 11127 to manage the National Retail Payment System, including InstaPay and PESONet.

Myanmar

MMQR

No ownership data

Account ownership: Excluded from the Global Findex 2025 survey round entirely, confirmed via the World Bank’s own methodology, not just unreported.
Everyday acceptance: 420,000 merchants, no breakdown by size. Central Bank of Myanmar’s own figure (Jan 2026) gives no split between street vendors and formal retail.
Value moved/yr: MMK12.7tn over 11 months (CBM), roughly US$5-6bn. Myanmar’s official rate of 2,100 kyat/US$ and a parallel-market rate as high as 7,500 make a precise conversion unreliable.
Online checkout: Only through a third-party bridge. MMQR has no e-commerce API of its own. KBZPay and Wave Money reach online checkout only via 2C2P, a facilitator, since 2020; Myanmar’s native online-payment product is a decade-old card scheme with about 600 confirmed merchants.
Settlement speed: CBM’s own Code of Conduct mandates real-time settlement for every transaction, as a regulatory requirement rather than an independently measured or verified figure.
Cost per transfer: Fees are bilaterally negotiated between banks and merchants, never centrally published, confirmed directly by a named CBM official, in Burmese.
Cash trend: A currency crisis, not a market trend. No currency-in-circulation series is published. What exists instead is emergency banknote printing, ATM withdrawal caps of 1-2 million kyat a day, and a cash black-market premium that has pushed the dollar as high as 7,500 kyat against an official rate of 2,100. That is supply-side rationing, not consumer preference.
Rail operator: PayPlus is licensed by a wholly state-owned central bank whose leadership the military installed, detaining Deputy Governor Bo Bo Nge on coup day and naming a replacement within two days. That bank has since directed wallet providers to freeze accounts tied to the resistance, closing at least 721 in May 2023 alone. Merchant fees are negotiated bank-by-bank and never published.

The rail, in brief

Before MMQR, Myanmar’s mobile wallets couldn’t talk to each other at all. A KBZPay customer couldn’t pay a merchant who only accepted AYA Pay, forcing people to juggle multiple wallets just to transact normally.

PayPlus, MMQR’s designated operator, blew past its own government’s first-year targets. Central bank officials had publicly aimed for 300,000 merchants and 3.8 million users within a year of launch; the actual count came in at 420,000 merchants and 24 million users.

How fast this moved

Feb 2021 The military detains Central Bank of Myanmar leadership during the coup and installs a new governor within two days.

Deputy Governor Bo Bo Nge was detained at his home on 1 February 2021, the day of the coup, per Wikipedia’s own sourced timeline; he was later sentenced to 20 years in prison after a closed-door trial. The junta named Than Nyein, who had already led the bank under the previous military government from 2007 to 2013, as governor on 2 February 2021, per CGTN. Every MMQR milestone below happens under a central bank installed this way, not one operating at arm’s length from the government.
May 2023 The junta closes at least 721 mobile-wallet accounts across the same wallet providers MMQR would later connect to.

Radio Free Asia’s own reporting: accounts across KBZPay, WavePay, AYAPay, and CBPay were closed on suspicion of funding anti-junta resistance groups, with no public appeal process; some closures reportedly caught ordinary business owners with no resistance ties. All four of these wallets are among MMQR’s 12 connected providers at launch.
Feb 2025 MMQR (“MyanmarPay”) launches, introduced by the Central Bank of Myanmar in Naypyidaw.

12 connected providers at launch: AYA Pay, KBZPay, Wave Money, OK$, CB Pay, UAB Pay, A+ Wallet, CTZ Pay, Yoma, Trusty, Zego, and Mpitesan. PayPlus Co., Ltd. operates the standard as CBM’s designated Digital Payment System Operator.
Jan 2026 MMQR reaches 24 million users and 420,000 merchants within about 11 months, beating the central bank’s own original one-year target of 3.8 million users and 300,000 merchants.

The original target came from CBM’s own Director General of the Financial Market, Payment and Settlement Department, Daw Khaing Shwe Wah, interviewed by Myanmar’s Ministry of Information the day after launch.

Regulators & terms

MMQR MMQR: Myanmar’s national QR payment standard ("MyanmarPay"), introduced by the Central Bank of Myanmar in February 2025 and operated by PayPlus.
CBM Central Bank of Myanmar: Introduced MMQR in February 2025; PayPlus operates the standard as its designated Digital Payment System Operator.
PayPlus PayPlus Co., Ltd.: The CBM-designated operator running MMQR, Myanmar’s national QR standard, with merchant fees negotiated bank-by-bank rather than centrally published.
KBZPay KBZPay: Myanmar’s most widely-adopted mobile wallet, backed by KBZ Bank, the country’s largest privately-owned bank.
Wave Money Wave Money: Operator of the WavePay mobile wallet, backed by Yoma Strategic Holdings, which bought out founding partner Telenor’s stake in December 2022, with the largest agent and merchant network of any Myanmar mobile-money provider.
2C2P 2C2P: A Singapore-headquartered payments platform operating across Southeast Asia, the third-party facilitator KBZPay and Wave Money route through for online checkout.

Cambodia

Bakong

Largely excluded

Account ownership: 39% own an account. Findex 2025, bank accounts and mobile-money wallets like Bakong itself combined, not bank accounts alone. Despite not requiring a bank account, just a national ID and phone number to register, Bakong processes transaction volume equal to 330% of Cambodia’s GDP in the same year.
Everyday acceptance: 4.5 million merchant accounts, up 36% in a year. National Bank of Cambodia’s own figure (end-2024), with no breakdown by merchant size or formality.
Value moved/yr: Cambodia’s cash economy is roughly 83% dollarized (83.4% of broad money as of end-2025, per AMRO), yet Bakong itself is nearly currency-neutral by transaction count, riel at 49% and USD 51%, though USD still dominates by value, at roughly 70%. That volume reached US$150.61bn in 2024, about 330% of Cambodia’s GDP that year.
Online checkout: Ready since 2020, storefront tooling came later. NBC’s own KHQR specification was built for online checkout from the start, though it only reached standard storefront tooling like Shopify, via ABA PayWay, ABA Bank’s own payment gateway, in October 2025.
Settlement speed: Bakong’s own tagline, identical in Khmer and English: "Send Money Anytime, Anywhere In a Minute."
Cost per transfer: Free of charge, 24/7, 365 days, by National Bank of Cambodia design.
Cash trend: Riel in circulation declining, but only measures half the story. Riel in circulation fell both as a share of the broader money supply (M2) and in absolute terms through 2024 (National Bank of Cambodia), though the figure can’t see the US dollar notes that dominate Cambodia’s 83%-dollarized cash economy.
Rail operator: The National Bank of Cambodia operates Bakong directly, as Indonesia’s BI-FAST does. USIP estimates Cambodia’s shadow economy moves roughly US$12.5bn a year, about half its GDP, mostly through crypto and Telegram platforms like Huione, not Bakong. When Tether froze US$29.62 million tied to Huione in July 2024, the funds stayed frozen; Huione activated a new address within hours and resumed in USDC.

The rail, in brief

NBC built Bakong explicitly to loosen Cambodia’s dependence on the US dollar. Chea Serey, who led its development before becoming Governor in 2023, has said dollar dependence leaves the country vulnerable to currency shocks Cambodia can’t control on its own.

That monetary-sovereignty goal sits oddly next to a cash economy still 83% dollarized five years on.

How fast this moved

Oct 2020 Bakong launches, NBC’s own interbank mobile payment platform.

Live from 28 October 2020, built on Hyperledger Iroha distributed-ledger technology, giving banks, microfinance institutions, and payment service providers a shared platform for peer-to-peer and QR transfers in real time. KHQR, the QR standard layered on top of it, wouldn’t roll out for another two years.
Jul 2022 KHQR’s formal rollout is announced.

Presided over by NBC’s Chea Serey at a launch ceremony in Phnom Penh on 4 July 2022, with 37 banks and financial institutions signed on and 29 of them already live across roughly 230,000 shops at launch.
Aug 2023 – Oct 2024 Cross-border KHQR links go live with Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, South Korea, and China, the most of any rail in this research after Thailand’s.

South Korea’s link (Aug 2024) runs through Jeonbuk Bank: mobile-app customers scan KHQR at roughly 3.3 million Cambodian merchant locations, settling instantly in riel, capped at 6 million riel (~US$1,500) a transaction, with zero charge on the QR-payment side itself (a separate US$1.50 remittance product is priced apart from this). China’s link (MOU Nov 2023, live launch 14 Oct 2024, Phnom Penh) runs through Alipay+, reaching over 1 million Cambodian merchant locations at launch.
Jan 2025 Bakong Tourist App with Visa launches, letting foreign-issued cards pay via KHQR.

NBC’s Governor presided over the 22 January 2025 launch, which lets foreign-issued Visa cards link into a Bakong wallet for KHQR payment at roughly 4.5 million merchant locations. Stated purpose: reducing cash friction and promoting riel usage among visitors.
Apr 2025 Cambodia joins Regional Payment Connectivity.

Cambodia became the ninth ASEAN central bank to sign on, announced 8 April 2025 alongside the second phase of the Malaysia-Cambodia cross-border QR link, on the sidelines of the ASEAN finance ministers’ meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

Regulators & terms

Bakong Bakong: Cambodia’s national payment platform, operated directly by the National Bank of Cambodia since October 2020.
KHQR KHQR: Cambodia’s national QR payment standard, layered on top of Bakong; formally rolled out in July 2022, two years after Bakong itself went live.
NBC National Bank of Cambodia: Cambodia’s central bank; operates Bakong directly, the same direct-operation model as Indonesia’s BI-FAST.

Comparing domestic payment rails

Account ownership	Everyday acceptance	Value moved/yr	Online checkout	Settlement speed	Cost per transfer	Cash trend	Rail operator
98% Widely served	90%+ residents, ~350k businesses per MAS’s own PayNow Gen2 report, 2025	S$301bn (US$224bn) processed domestically in 2025, MAS’s own report	Yes, minority use ~9% of e-commerce value, versus 73% for cards	Seconds (unconfirmed) MAS: "a matter of seconds," no exact figure	Free anti-surcharge rule since March 2024, not retroactive	Cash rising an all-time high of S$65.5bn (~US$51.4bn) in January 2025	ABS Industry body; froze 180+ accounts and S$486k in a single Nov 2025 raid
89% Widely served	2.6M+ QR points Bank Negara’s own count; 800+ more via a rural e-Duit Desa push	RM31.1bn (~US$7.6bn) DuitNow QR alone, up from RM14.6bn (~US$3.59bn) in 2023	Yes, separate rail a distinct bank-transfer product, not DuitNow QR itself	Seconds (unconfirmed) real-time only since RENTAS+ launched Oct 2025	Free (P2P) QR merchant fee 0.25-0.5%, waived under RM15mn turnover	Cash rising risen every year without exception since 2020	PayNet Bank consortium; BNM holds 35.5% of PayNet, cutting its stake
92% Widely served	987k scheme-registered one stimulus scheme’s sign-up count, not a national total	US$1.6tn/yr (2025) 27.4bn transactions in 2025, up 12.8% YoY, per BOT	Yes, via gateways 26% of e-commerce value in 2026, versus 24% for cards	≤60 seconds BOT’s own stated maximum for interbank settlement	Free ≤฿5,000 (~US$152) a threshold not a fee; THB2-10 (US$0.06-0.30) above it	Cash down at retail, up for hoarding large withdrawals over ฿1m (~US$30,400) reversing higher, presumed hoarding	NITMX Bank consortium; a shared registry can freeze any bank account
71% Majority served	741k+ POS devices undated NAPAS figure; informal-market reach unclear	8.9bn transfers/yr a transaction count; no value figure exists for this rail	Yes, expanding 29% of e-commerce value in 2026, near-tied with cards and wallets	~1 second a dated 2021 executive quote, not a current SLA	Free ≤500,000 VND (~US$19) NAPAS’s own wholesale waiver; most banks advertise free anyway	Cash signals conflict cash’s money-supply share up, but ATM withdrawals down 29%	NAPAS Bank consortium; SBV holds 49%; 86M+ accounts frozen since Sep 2025
50% Majority served	2.5M merchants PPMI’s own figure; BSP’s official count still stuck at 2021	₱11.554tn (US$198bn) up 57% from ₱7.347tn the year before	Yes, purpose-built 24% of e-commerce value in 2026, ahead of cards at 21%	Real-time (no figure) InstaPay is 24/7, no exact time published	Free since a July 2026 BSP fee cap; ₱5-30 (~US$0.09-0.51) before that	Cash declining a significant negative relationship found, BSP’s own model	PPMI Industry body; forced GCash to cut gambling access within 48 hours
38% Largely excluded	No data anywhere zero mentions in Bank of Laos’s own annual report	No data kip only; baht and dollars sit outside the rail entirely	Yes, but unused a bank gateway for foreign cards; no marketplace exists locally	No time published LAPNet has never published a settlement-time figure	From 1,000 kip (~US$0.05) LAPNet’s own schedule, later quietly removed from its site	Cash ticking up off a 2023 low, still below 2021 levels	LAPNet State + bank JV; basic figures like this one are never published
49% Largely excluded	40M merchants 93% of them UMKM small businesses, per Bank Indonesia	~Rp11,406tn/yr (US$700bn/yr) annualized from nine months of BI-FAST data	Yes, via banks mostly bank virtual accounts, not QRIS itself	Real-time (no figure) BI says "real time," no exact seconds figure	Rp2,500 (~US$0.16) capped directly by Bank Indonesia itself	Cash rising 13-16% annually, even as ATM terminals disappear	Bank Indonesia Central bank; OJK froze 33,000+ gambling-linked accounts since 2024
39% Largely excluded	4.5M accounts up 36% in a year, National Bank of Cambodia’s own count	US$150.61bn (riel + USD combined) 49% riel, 51% USD by count; USD still 70% by value	Yes, since 2020 built in from the start, though storefront tooling came later	Within a minute Bakong’s own tagline, not a third-party measurement	Free 24/7, 365 days, by National Bank of Cambodia design	Cash declining (riel only) can’t see the US dollars that dominate cash use	National Bank of Cambodia Central bank; Huione dodged a Tether freeze via a new address
No data no Findex figure has ever been published	No data yet tarusQR only went nationwide in February 2026	No data no transaction-volume figure has ever been published	Yes, cards only bank card gateways; tarusQR has no online role	Seconds (unconfirmed) tarus says "a few seconds," no numeric SLA	Free (for now) introductory phase, explicitly subject to future review	Cash declining fell every year from 2021 to 2025, ATM count too	ndpx State + bank JV; BIBD and Baiduri, its own shareholders, still not onboarded
No data excluded from Findex’s 2025 survey round	420k merchants no breakdown by street vendor versus formal retail	MMK12.7tn/11mo (~US$5-6bn) official rate 2,100 kyat/US$, parallel market up to 7,500	Yes, but limited only through a third-party facilitator since 2020	Mandated, unverified CBM requires it, but never independently verified	Undisclosed negotiated bank-by-bank, never centrally published	Cash crisis, not a trend emergency printing and ATM caps, not consumer preference	PayPlus State-licensed operator; junta-run central bank freezes resistance accounts

What this means

Speed and cost are already solved across most of this region, built directly by central banks and bank consortiums rather than through market competition among private providers. What's still missing isn't infrastructure. It's account ownership in Cambodia and Laos, and basic fee transparency in Myanmar. Both are governance problems, not technology gaps.

Online checkout is its own unfinished piece, and not always for the same reason. These domestic rails move money directly between payer and payee, no card network required at all, yet checkout mostly still runs through one. Thailand's PromptPay reaches online shoppers only through a licensed gateway charging a card-like fee, Malaysia's DuitNow QR skips online checkout entirely, and most of the rest lean on bank virtual accounts, unused pilot programs, or third-party bridges instead. Only a handful, the Philippines and Cambodia among them, built checkout in from the start, and even there, scanning a QR code or getting redirected to a banking app is still a slower habit to form than a card already saved to autofill at checkout.

Card habits aren't just inertia, either. Merchants already build the card fee into the sticker price, so a shopper pays the same total whether they tap a card or scan a QR code. Thailand's own numbers show why. PromptPay checkout costs a merchant 1.65%, cards cost 3.65%, and that saving stays with the merchant unless they choose to pass it on. Cards already compete for shoppers with points and cashback; these rails don't yet compete on visible price the same way. Until that changes, cards remain the default.

What to watch

A separate, genuinely competitive layer is building on top of these state-anchored rails. Grab, a ride-hailing and delivery app first, now holds actual banking licenses of its own, Singapore's GXS Bank and Malaysia's GXBank, and has taken control of Indonesia's Superbank, without ever being a bank to begin with. The Philippines' GCash and Maya run that country's e-wallet market the same way; Myanmar's KBZPay and Wave Money did too, before the coup complicated everything. None of them started out as a bank. They got there through a different door instead, a digital banking license, an e-money issuer permit, a mobile financial services license, not the traditional banking charter every other rail in this piece runs through. Whether that parallel channel eventually connects to the same national rails profiled here, or keeps competing alongside them as something separate, is the more interesting question.

Whoever holds a customer's money between transfers controls more than settlement. Banks and wallets have already frozen or restricted accounts through these rails in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar, for fraud, for gambling, for politics. The other form of that power is quieter. The Philippines' own e-money rules bar a GCash or Maya balance from earning interest for its holder, even though the deposits and government securities backing that balance elsewhere do. The real question is simpler. Does any of the savings from efficiency gains ever make it back to the user, be it in the form of lower fees or savings interest? That's what matters most to the people using these rails every day.