Choosing payment providers for Southeast Asia: what to ask in each market

Provider shortlists for Southeast Asia tend to start with a map and six flags. The map is true and not very useful. A provider can process QRIS for an Indonesian company and still be unable to take PromptPay for your entity in Europe. It can list “Malaysia” and offer cards but not bank payments. The differences appear only when you ask method by method, and for the entity you actually have.

This article is the list of questions to ask in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. It starts with the questions that apply everywhere, then goes country by country, and ends with a comparison, an illustrative scorecard and the common mistakes. How many providers to hold is a separate question, covered in how many PSPs per market; for how national QR systems differ at checkout, see QR payments for e-commerce.

What should you ask every Southeast Asian provider?

Seven questions apply in every country, and the answers often differ by country within the same provider:

1. Which of my entities can you onboard, per method? Ask for each method in each country. “We support Thailand” is not an answer.
2. Is the method live today? Ask what is in production for merchants like you, not what is in preview.
3. Local or cross-border? Does a local entity and acquirer handle the payment, or is it collected locally and moved abroad?
4. What are the limits and timeouts? Ask for minimum, maximum and how long the shopper has to approve.
5. How do refunds work? Ask for the window, and whether the method refunds at all. Our article on refunds across local methods explains why this varies.
6. How and when do I get paid? Ask for the settlement currency, the FX spread and the days to reach your account.
7. Which local cards do you acquire? “Cards” usually means Visa and Mastercard. Ask about domestic schemes too.

Why does your entity decide what you can offer?

Because most of these rails were built for domestic merchants, and providers draw the line in different places. A short comparison shows it clearly.

Method	Stripe	Another provider
QRIS	Preview, for Indonesian and US accounts, marked as supporting cross-border	Xendit lists QRIS for Indonesia and does not address businesses abroad
PromptPay	Thai accounts; private preview for US accounts	Xendit lists it for Thailand, with no entity rule on its channel page
FPX	Malaysian accounts only; not cross-border; needs a business registration number	Xendit lists it for Malaysia, with no entity rule on its channel page
PayNow	Singaporean accounts only; not cross-border	Airwallex lists entities in Hong Kong, China, Australia, the UK, the EU, Singapore, the US, New Zealand and Malaysia

The lesson is not that one provider is better. It is that a method on a provider’s list tells you nothing until you know which entity it applies to. Foreign demand is real: the Xendit and Cube report, as covered by Fintech News Singapore, puts cross-border e-commerce at 19% of the market in Singapore, 15% in Thailand, 14% in Vietnam, 12% in Malaysia, 9% in the Philippines and 6% in Indonesia.

What should you ask in each market?

Indonesia: what should you ask?

Start with QRIS and e-wallets. Bank Indonesia reports 70.6 million QRIS users and 49.4 million merchants, with transactions up 75.8% year on year in the third quarter of 2026. The Xendit and Cube report says 70% of Indonesian shoppers rely on e-wallets for at least half of their online purchases.

• Which limit applies? Stripe and Xendit’s QRIS page both give a maximum of IDR 10,000,000. Xendit’s channel table shows IDR 20,000,000. Get your number in the contract.
• How fast is settlement? Xendit’s QRIS page says T+1 business day and its channel table T+2. Stripe says up to T+4.
• How do refunds work? Xendit says refund support varies by issuer: GoPay does not allow partial refunds, for example. Stripe allows 45 days.
• Which wallets and bank routes? Xendit’s list shows GoPay, OVO, DANA, ShopeePay and bank virtual accounts as separate channels, most of which have their own limits.

Stripe also notes that IDR amounts must end in .00. See the Indonesia guide.

Thailand: what should you ask?

Start with PromptPay. The Nation, citing National ITMX, reports 82.91 million registrations at the end of May 2026 and 2.38 billion transactions that month. The Xendit and Cube report says 61% of Thai shoppers rely on account-to-account transfers for at least half of their online purchases.

• Can you onboard my entity? Stripe lists Thai accounts, with a private preview for US accounts.
• How do refunds work? Xendit’s channel table shows no refund support for PromptPay. Stripe supports refunds but must first ask the customer for the bank account details.
• What does the shopper see? Stripe says customers see its Thai company name, not yours, and custom descriptors are ignored. Ask each provider, because a name the shopper does not recognise leads to support calls.
• What about reused codes? Stripe warns that a QR code used again can take funds a second time. Ask how repeat payments are detected.

See the Thailand guide.

Philippines: what should you ask?

Start with GCash. Insider PH, citing Mynt’s IPO filing, reports 40.4 million monthly active users on 31 March 2026, nearly 55% of Philippine adults and about four times its nearest competitor.

• What are the terms? Xendit lists GCash at PHP 1 to 100,000, settling T+2, with refunds for 180 days.
• Do you also offer QR Ph? Xendit lists QR Ph at PHP 1 to 50,000, T+1, with no refund support, next to wallets such as PayMaya and GrabPay.
• Do you cover online banking? Xendit lists bank channels separately, each with its own limit.

See the Philippines guide.

Malaysia: what should you ask?

Ask about FPX and DuitNow together, because the rails are changing. RinggitPlus reported that Maybank moved to DuitNow Online Banking from 31 March 2025, describing it as a PayNet service introduced to replace FPX.

• Which banks does each rail reach? Xendit’s DuitNow Pay page lists FPX and DuitNow Pay as separate rails and shows banks that support only one of them.
• What are the terms? Xendit lists consumer FPX at MYR 1 to 30,000, T+2, with no refunds, and DuitNow Pay at MYR 1 to 30,000, T+1, with refunds for 90 days. Stripe’s FPX allows refunds for 180 days, which can take up to 6 weeks.
• Is MyDebit included? PayNet’s older developer documentation describes MyDebit as a debit scheme that supports card-not-present payments, with merchants recruited by acquirers authorised by PayNet or Bank Negara Malaysia. Ask whether your acquirer can route these cards at all.

See the Malaysia guide.

Singapore: what should you ask?

Start with cards, then PayNow. The Xendit and Cube report says about 60% of online purchases in Singapore use cards, with bank transfers at 35% and e-wallets at 33%.

• Can you onboard my entity? This is where the Stripe and Airwallex answers differ most.
• How does mobile work? Stripe says a shopper on a phone saves the QR image and uploads it to their app. That is slower than a tap, so test it.
• How long does the code last? Stripe says 1 hour; Airwallex lists a 10-minute session.
• What about payments by UEN? Airwallex says payments made by entering a UEN, not by scanning, are not supported and are returned the same day.

See the Singapore guide.

Vietnam: what should you ask?

Ask about VietQR, wallets and NAPAS cards. The Xendit and Cube report calls VietQR the fastest-growing rail, with transaction value up 151% in 2025. NAPAS, which runs a card switching system, says its domestic cards begin with 9704 and that it serves more than 80 million customers through 68 member banks and finance companies.

• Do you take domestic NAPAS cards? A form that accepts only Visa and Mastercard will not take them.
• Which wallets? Xendit lists MoMo, ZaloPay and ShopeePay, each at VND 1 to 50,000,000, T+2.
• Can you offer VietQR online? Ask whether the payment is matched automatically to the order.

See the Vietnam guide.

How do the markets compare?

Market	Start with	First question	Watch out for
Indonesia	QRIS, e-wallets	Which limit and settlement apply to me?	Refund rules that vary by issuer
Thailand	PromptPay	Can you onboard my entity?	Refunds that need the customer’s bank details
Philippines	GCash	What are your wallet terms?	QR Ph with no refund support
Malaysia	FPX, DuitNow	Which banks does each rail reach?	Banks that sit on one rail only
Singapore	Cards, PayNow	Can you onboard my entity?	Slow mobile flow on QR
Vietnam	VietQR, wallets, NAPAS cards	Do you take domestic cards?	Manual matching of transfers

Worked example: what does a scorecard look like?

Example figures, for illustration only.

An online electronics store in Germany plans to launch in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, and sends the questions above to two providers, called A and B here.

Question	Provider A	Provider B
Singapore: cards and PayNow for our entity	Yes, yes	Yes, no
Thailand: PromptPay for our entity	No	Yes
Indonesia: QRIS and e-wallets for our entity	Yes, yes	QRIS only
Settlement	EUR, T+3	USD, T+2
Refunds on QR methods	Partial	Full only

Neither wins on every row. Provider A covers Singapore and Indonesia in full, and Provider B is the only route to PromptPay. The store might use A as its main provider and B for Thailand, then revisit once volumes are known. The scorecard also records why, which helps when the decision is questioned a year later.

What are the common mistakes?

• Assuming a listed method applies to your entity. Check it for your company, in writing.
• One Southeast Asia price. Ask for each country and method separately.
• Treating cash on delivery as the plan. The Xendit and Cube report says it is now well under a third of the region’s e-commerce transactions. See moving from cash on delivery to online payment for the approach.
• Ignoring refunds until launch. On several rails, a refund needs bank details or is not available at all.
• Showing only Visa and Mastercard. Domestic schemes need their own connection. See local vs cross-border acquiring.
• No second route. One provider per country means one point of failure; see single PSP risk.

How does Omno help when you use several Southeast Asian providers?

Omno puts the providers you choose behind one integration, and each provider onboards you separately. PSP eligibility rules decide which providers may take a payment, and routing rules by country, currency or amount choose among them. If a provider is unavailable or rejects the request, the payment moves to the next provider in the rule until one accepts. The full transaction trail lets you check your scorecard against real traffic. The payment orchestration page shows how providers are configured.