Baskar Subramanian, CEO of Vaultura, the parent company of cross-border payments and accommodation platforms Mobi and Canis, why linking national QR systems in ASEAN is real progress, and why it leaves a serious regional problem untouched.
The five founding members of ASEAN’s Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand have now completed linking their national QR payment systems. QRIS, DuitNow, QR Ph, PayNow, and PromptPay have been linked together into a single integrated network that covers an area of 420 million consumers. A visitor from Jakarta can now scan a merchant code in Bangkok and pay directly through an Indonesian bank account. A migrant worker in Kuala Lumpur can send money home to Manila without touching a remittance counter. Cross-border QR transactions across the region had reached 12.9 million in the first half of 2025, before the network was fully connected. Discovery, as usual, comes before the infrastructure built to support it at scale.
It is a real success, the product of the ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity initiative five major banks officially operate in 2022 and has since expanded to Vietnam, Brunei, and Laos, with the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Nexus providing the basic infrastructure. It is also, and this is the missing part of the coverage, the issue of consumer payments. It solves the visitor who buys coffee or the worker who sends money home. It doesn’t settle for a neighboring business trying to pay a supplier in another currency.
What the QR Network Actually Fixes
QR interlinking is designed for point-of-sale and person-to-person transfers: small ticket sizes, single payment at the scanning point, and a use case where payer and payee are (almost) in the same transaction. That’s exactly the right structure for tourism and remittances, the two largest consumer payments flowing into the region.
They were designed for, and do not affect, the instruments of business payments: invoices, treasury positions, terms of payment, reconciliation against purchase orders, or compliance with the banking relationships necessary to move money on a commercial scale across borders. Commercial QR scanning takes seconds because it solves a small problem. A business that pays twelve suppliers in four countries on net-30 terms is a completely different solution.
Problem Left Unfixed
That particular issue went nowhere. Correspondent banking, which is still the default channel for most B2B cross-border payments in the region, takes three to five business days and covers all costs ranging from 2 to 7% including wire fees, FX markups, and intermediary deductions. New rails are beginning to erode the $173 trillion global banking market, but the erosion is not the same as replacement, and many middle-market businesses operating across Southeast Asia are still moving money through it today.
Costs are much lower for small businesses. Fewer banking relationships, larger capitals, and less leverage mean that an SME growing from Jakarta to Manila and Bangkok is facing the same conflict that a large business can better ignore: trapped working capital sitting in local accounts to manage FX risk, high reconciliations associated with every new market entry, and payment not designed to address QR’s failure to solve the problem. this is the beginning.
Businesses Worth Their Infrastructure
Consumer goods and business goods are not the same problem in wearing different clothes. They need different infrastructure, and building the first one doesn’t get you the second one for free. This is a gap that Mobi has been working on since 2014: cross-border collections, payments, cash accounts, and regional payment connections designed specifically for businesses sending money to Southeast Asian markets, not consumers sending money across the border on the weekend.
That means holding and staying in the local currency within each market rather than moving everything through a single hub currency. It means collections that match the invoice that the finance team actually issued, not a QR code that the customer decided to scan. And it means payment methods designed to hit local bank accounts and e-wallets in a reliable way, with the volumes and schedules that the financial activity of the business goes on, not the amount of the tourist corridor that was designed around it.
For corridors where speed in the payment leg is critical, especially payments for time-sensitive providers or platforms that manage the flow of multiple funds available regularly, Canis’s stablecoin-based settlement sits alongside Mobi’s fiat infrastructure as a complementary option, moving value through the corridor before converting back to the local currency. It is one tool within a broader set, not a replacement for the fiat rails many B2B relationships in the region still operate.
The Story Under the Story
ASEAN’s QR communication deserves the attention it’s getting. It’s a well-done piece of regional infrastructure that will continue to grow in capacity as more corridors connect. But to take it as proof that Southeast Asia has “solved” cross-border payments misreads the problem it was designed to solve. Regional businesses, and supplier networks, trading companies, and social networks
and their counterparts in all four or five currencies at the same time, are still waiting for their equivalents. That is the infrastructure that Mobi has been building for over a decade, and this is where the next chapter of the ASEAN payments story really needs to be written.
Baskar Subramanian is the CEO of Vaultura, a payments infrastructure group headquartered in Singapore, which operates Mobi, a cross-border payments and settlement platform, and Canis, a stablecoin-native cross-border B2B platform, in global markets.
