> Wechat pay is quite popular even outside of China

You have to be a Chinese tourist to use it. It isn't used by locals or tourists from other countries.

Other countries solved the cashless problem long ago with credit cards, which just never caught on (mainly because of horrible banks, ICBC AmEx places the burden of proof on card holders for fraud).

I've only been to an ATM twice since leaving China in late 2016. As a foreigner, WeChat never worked very well for me (they want a copy of my Chinese ID card????), so I had to carry lots of cash. Heck, before around 2012, I was even paying the rent with cash (pay once every 3 months, need 20k+ RMB...ATM has withdraw limit of 3K RMB per transaction...ugh).

Alipay is all over the place in Thailand.

Yep, them too. They could have dominated the region were it opened to international payments, but seems like typical stubborn government getting in the way, doubt tencent or alibaba are holding it back. Even for foreigners with work permits in China it's apparently incredibly hard to link foreign accounts with these payments systems.

Works great for the Chinese, not so much anyone else. They really dropped the ball on that. I see local alternatives springing up all around the place. Grab probably will win out in South East Asia.

I'm quite used to contactless payments in Australia but work over there a lot and going back to card + pin is painful. I'd happily use the QR code payments given the chance but legacy banking is struggling to adapt.

QR is a poor substitute for contactless. America has screwed up their chips, however, making even contactless pay too slow, I can't imagine QR codes would improve anything unless the money was onloaded somehow (like how it works at Starbucks).

American EMV has some dumb decisions baked in, but as far as speed goes it's not the chips, it's the existing in-store backend processors. A lot of them are over slow and unreliable connections (GPRS is super-common, as are phone lines shared by many points of sale). As processors are forced to upgrade, Americans are seeing faster chip transactions.

Companies that prioritize this--Walgreens comes to mind as an obvious example--have chip auth under ten seconds. It isn't optimal, but it's improving.

Even stores with faster connections like grocery stores in bigger cities it is "wait a few seconds" (less than ten, they have it down to 3-5 seconds at this point) and then collect the receipt after it slowly prints out.

Whereas in Australia, it is just "tap and go." Starbucks works similarly with their QR code buying (but the money is onloaded to a digital gift card; but then I never use it anymore since mobile ordering is so damned convenient).

Can't speak to Australia. My barometer is Europe; in urban England it was still five seconds and in rural France it was worse than at home.

(I agree it's less than ten, I just couldn't remember any off the top of my head that I felt confident asserting.)