Baskar Subramanian, CEO of Vaultura, parent company of cross-border payments and settlements platforms Mobi and Canis, on why linking ASEAN's national QR systems is real progress, and why it leaves the region's harder problem untouched.
Five founding members of ASEAN's Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand have now completed the linkage of their national QR payment systems. QRIS, DuitNow, QR Ph, PayNow, and PromptPay have been linked together into a single interoperable network spanning a 420 million consumer zone. A tourist from Jakarta can now scan a merchant's code in Bangkok and pay directly out of 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 already reached 12.9 million in the first half of 2025, before the network was even fully linked. Adoption, as usual, arriving ahead of the infrastructure built to support it at scale.
It is a genuine achievement, the product of the ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity initiative that five central banks formalized in 2022 and have since expanded to Vietnam, Brunei, and Laos, with the Bank for International Settlements' Project Nexus providing the underlying architecture. It is also, and this is the part getting lost in the coverage, a consumer payments story. It solves for a tourist buying a coffee or a worker sending remittances home. It does not solve for the business next door trying to pay a supplier in another currency.
What the QR Network Actually Fixes
QR interlinking is built for point-of-sale and person-to-person transfers: small ticket sizes, single-currency settlement at the point of scan, and a use case where the payer and payee are standing (virtually) in the same transaction. That is exactly the right architecture for tourism and remittances, two of the largest consumer payment flows in the region.
It was not designed for, and does not touch, the mechanics of business payments: invoicing, multi-currency treasury positions, payment terms, reconciliation against purchase orders, or the compliance and banking relationships required to move money at commercial scale across borders. A retail QR scan settles in seconds because it is solving a narrow problem. A business paying twelve suppliers across four countries on net-30 terms is solving a different one entirely.
The Problem Left Unfixed
That different problem has not gone anywhere. Correspondent banking, still the default rail for most B2B cross-border payments in the region, settles in three to five business days and carries all-in costs of 2 to 7 percent once wire fees, FX markups, and intermediary deductions are counted. New rails are starting to erode a correspondent banking market estimated at $173 trillion globally, but erosion is not the same as replacement, and most mid-market businesses operating across Southeast Asia are still moving money through it today.
The cost falls hardest on smaller businesses. Fewer banking relationships, thinner cash buffers, and less negotiating leverage mean an SME expanding from Jakarta into Manila and Bangkok absorbs the same friction a much larger enterprise can better afford to ignore: trapped working capital sitting in local accounts to manage FX risk, reconciliation overhead that compounds with every new market entered, and payment failures that a QR-scale system was never built to prevent because it was never asked to solve for this in the first place.
Businesses Deserve Their Own Infrastructure
Consumer rails and business rails are not the same problem wearing different clothes. They need different infrastructure, and building the first does not get you the second for free. This is the gap Mobi has operated in since 2014: cross-border collections, payouts, multi-currency accounts, and regional payment connectivity built specifically for businesses moving money across Southeast Asian markets, not consumers moving money across a border for a weekend.
That means holding and settling in local currency inside each market rather than routing everything through a single hub currency. It means collections that reconcile against the invoice a finance team actually issued, not a QR code a customer happened to scan. And it means payout rails built to hit local bank accounts and e-wallets reliably, at the volumes and schedules a business's finance function runs on, not the volumes a tourist corridor was designed around.
For corridors where speed on the settlement leg matters most, particularly time-sensitive supplier payments or platforms managing high-frequency multi-currency flows, Canis's stablecoin-based settlement sits alongside Mobi's fiat infrastructure as a complementary option, moving value across the corridor before converting back to local currency at the destination. It is one tool within a broader set, not a replacement for the fiat rails that most B2B relationships in the region still run on.
The Story Underneath the Story
ASEAN's QR interlinking deserves the attention it is getting. It is a well-executed piece of regional infrastructure that will keep growing in volume as more corridors connect. But treating it as evidence that Southeast Asia has "solved" cross-border payments misreads what problem it was built to solve. The region's businesses, with the supplier networks, the trading companies, and the platforms settling
with counterparties across four or five currencies at once, are still waiting for their equivalent. That is the infrastructure Mobi has been building for over a decade, and it is where the next chapter of ASEAN's payments story actually needs to be written.
Baskar Subramanian is CEO of Vaultura, the payments infrastructure group headquartered in Singapore, operating Mobi, a cross-border fiat payments and settlement platform, and Canis, a stablecoin-native B2B cross-border settlement platform, across global markets.
