The interop with banking across SEA is pretty cool now, most countries have cross border payments with nothing more than a QR code. And this is down to the hawker stall level.

It's advancing a lot quicker than you'd expect given that many of the countries aren't really that good at coordinating with each other.

why didn’t these countries go the NFC route instead of QR codes?

QR code still works when either end is low-tech (paper/wearable/sticker), by using out-of-band means (SMS/soundbox) to confirm the transaction.

Further, NFC is usually the first to be left out when manufacturers cut costs to hit lucrative price points.

Apple never implemented host card emulation (HCE) as an API, but that doesn't matter as these payment systems usually aren't backed by a payment card network, thus they'd have to build needlessly complex reconcilliation systems when transactions already debit directly from accounts, and offline usage isn't considered a major use-case.

Nfc needs a special chip qr code needs just a picture and camera. Makes a huge difference in infrastructure cost. Getting millions of shops to put in nfc terminals compared to get them to print qr codes makes adoption a lot faster

To build on the other comments, because anyone can just print up their QR code. Somchai the Tuk-Tuk driver can simply print the QR code for his personal bank account and glue it to the roof of his Tuk-Tuk and now he accepts electronic payments.

thank you all for replying. i now understand a bit better why they went the QR route.

Some sellers don't have a smartphone/screen and rely on the honesty of the user (they just ask to show them the receipt). I don't know how they manage their wallet though (maybe their kid or a friend?).

The "wallet" is just an ordinary bank account in these cases.

Spending quite some time in both Malaysia and Thailand I can say that the support for cross country payments is still not great. I’m rarely able to use my Malaysian banking app (Maybank) to pay in Thailand. Most of the times when I tried the QR code is not recognized. Which means I still need to carry cash with me all the time.

For me it was 50/50 too. But this launched very recently. Here to hoping they fix their system.

Seems like it's a good example of developing countries skipping technological nodes and ending up with better solutions. For example, most of eastern Europe was already using fiber/copper Ethernet 15-20 years ago, while most western Europe and US were stuck with crappy DSL lines.

In the payment processing sphere, we are stuck with a duopoly that charges insane fees for something that was very complex and labor intensive 50 years ago. But today - if we could start from scratch - the entire payment volume of EU can be processed on a well provisioned computing rack with a software written in less than a year by a small team. It could be offered by ECB as a free service, with strong privacy guarantees written in EU law.

Entire modes of fraud, such as credit card cloning, would cease to exist. Online payments - seamless, safe, and instantaneous, just scan a QR code.

But we cannot start from scratch because the incumbent is good enough and the rent they extract from each member of society is small enough to not motivate them to initiate a switch, even if the aggregate rent is a staggering amount that would be recouped in days of the new system going online.

But is QR Code scanning a better solution? Credit card cloning only affect the legacy magnetic strip I think?

Someone can just stick a QR code on top of the office one. [1]

[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/can-i-trust-this-qr-code-c...

These systems work with several modes, UEN (Unique entity number, Phone number, National Id Number and QR)

For in person transactions, NFC is perfect. For internet payments, a dynamically generated QR code is secure and far superior to the current setup:

  * find physical card or virtual in an app

  * copy paste or insert "secret" numbers, and trust the website won't save them, because they are static

  * insert a bunch of personal data which the merchant has no real reason to know, but that is used for "fraud detection" because they don't trust you are the real owner of the "secret" static password

  * go back to your phone and get the SMS/3dsecure validation prompt, because it turns out your bank also doesn't trust the secrecy of the "secret" numbers they issued you

  * finally, pray to the cave gods the transaction has gone trough the complex duct tape and  bubble gum contraption, is not flagged for review or reversed by the various intermediaries etc.

It's all a baroque mess, multiple layers of cruft accumulated over the decades. To compare, even a crypto transaction is much smoother and simpler, navigate to checkout, scan the QR code with your wallet app, press pay and you are done. And that's not to praise crypto, any solution designed from scratch for the age of the internet will be much better.

Imagine a zero-day in Linux kernel cleaning out bank accounts of entire continent.

I'm not entirely sure how you imagine Visa's fees protect you from Linux kernel zero days. More than likely, the unwieldy infrastructure with massive technical debt accrued over decades has a much larger attack surface and uses a myriad of more or less obsolete technology.

Also, the payment system should not be confused with the banking system. Complete control over the payment system would give the attacker the ability to deny payments or make fraudulent ones, but would not, for example, allow the attacker access to accounts not linked to a payment instrument, or allow them to circumvent the limits set on such instruments.

Already does between Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand with ISO 20022 compliant cross border fast payments.