Central banks and payment operators across Southeast Asia are working to complete a multilateral instant-payment network in 2026, building on national QR systems that already connect eight countries and settle tens of millions of cross-border transactions a year. The effort combines two separate initiatives: ASEAN's bilateral Regional Payment Connectivity (RPC) framework, which has been expanding since 2022, and Project Nexus, a hub-and-spoke platform led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub that is targeting full rollout this year.
Under RPC, ten Southeast Asian economies now operate national unified QR standards, and eight of them can already be scanned across at least one border: Cambodia's KHQR, Indonesia's QRIS, Laos's Lao QR, Malaysia's DuitNow, the Philippines' QR Ph, Singapore's PayNow, Thailand's PromptPay and Vietnam's VietQR. As of December 2025, the network carried 29 active cross-border linkages processing an estimated 36.2 million transactions worth $716.4 million, according to figures compiled by the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO). Bank Negara Malaysia Governor Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour said in November that ASEAN cross-border QR payments reached 12.9 million transactions in the first half of 2025 alone, a pace officials expect to accelerate as more corridors go live.
The template for the network was set in 2021, when Thailand's PromptPay and Singapore's PayNow launched what the World Economic Forum described as the world's first linkage between two national fast-payment systems. Malaysia's DuitNow joined the web in 2023, connecting first with Singapore's PayNow and then with Indonesia's QRIS, while Vietnam's VietQR linked to PromptPay the same year. Each new corridor has followed roughly the same pattern: a bilateral technical agreement between two central banks, followed by a pilot period before merchants and consumers on both sides gain full access.
Traffic Data From the Busiest Corridor
Thailand's National ITMX, which operates PromptPay, reported 2.38 billion domestic transactions in May 2026, up 15% year-on-year, with combined value reaching 4.45 trillion baht. Registered users stood at 82.91 million, split between 82.5 million individual accounts and roughly 410,000 business accounts, on a system the Bank of Thailand mandated in 2017. Inbound cross-border QR payments from foreign visitors climbed 382% year-on-year to 1.51 billion baht in May, with China accounting for more than 60% of that value, followed by Malaysia and Laos.
That inbound surge points to tourism rather than trade as the network's most visible early driver, even as officials frame the broader project around intraregional commerce. A Thai vendor accepting a PayNow-linked scan from a Singaporean visitor, or an Indonesian merchant taking a DuitNow payment from a Malaysian shopper, settles the transaction in local currency within seconds and without a card network taking a cut in between — the mechanism RPC was designed around from the start.
A Single Gateway to Replace Dozens of Bilateral Deals
Each RPC link requires its own technical agreement between two central banks, a structure that grows harder to scale as more countries join and more corridors need separate integration work. Project Nexus is designed to replace that model with a single connection point: each domestic instant-payment system links once to a central gateway and gains access to every other participant on the network, rather than negotiating country-by-country.
India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are the initiative's founding participants. Nexus Global Payments, the nonprofit entity established in Singapore in April 2025 to run the platform, is working through legal and operational standards with national central banks and is expected to appoint a technical operator this year. The BIS has said the system is designed to settle cross-border payments in under 60 seconds, a benchmark closer to domestic transfer speeds than to the multi-day settlement typical of correspondent banking.
Indonesia's central bank has said it is pursuing QRIS interoperability beyond Southeast Asia, following a link with Japan that went live in August 2025 — the first connection between an ASEAN QR standard and a payment system outside the region.
The push toward interoperability reflects a structural problem specific to Southeast Asia: the region trades and travels across ten separate currencies, compared with the euro area's single currency, which has historically meant higher transaction costs and heavier reliance on the US dollar as an intermediary even for payments between neighboring countries. RPC's founding members reaffirmed a commitment to advancing local-currency settlement alongside payment connectivity at the 42nd ASEAN Summit in 2023 — a commitment that becomes fully testable only once Project Nexus is live and its member systems begin routing transactions through the shared gateway.