Visa’s November 12 announcement of its Scan to Pay solution for QR payment adoption across Asia Pacific raises a fundamental query: what took so long, and does anyone really need this?
The payment network giant has launched partnerships with digital wallets including Samsung Wallet across eight Asia Pacific markets (Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Vietnam), LINE Pay (Taiwan), VNPT Money (Vietnam), Woori Card and Hyundai Card (Korea), and regional QR payment providers including Lakala (Mainland China), FOMO Pay (Singapore), VNPAY (Vietnam), NextPay (Vietnam), and OpenRice (Hong Kong).
But for marketing professionals tracking digital commerce trends in the region, the more pressing query isn’t what Visa is doing—it’s whether this represents real innovation or a defensive play in markets where the corporate has already lost considerable ground to locally dominant payment platforms.
The technology that point forgot—until now
Here’s the inconvenient reality: Visa’s press release doesn’t acknowledge that QR payment adoption in the Asia Pacific happened years ago, and Visa wasn’t a part of it. Alipay and WeChat Pay dominated China’s payment landscape by the mid-2010s.
GrabPay, Touch ‘n Go eWallet, GCash, Paytm, and PhonePe became household names across Southeast and South Asia while international card networks scrambled to keep up relevance. Visa Scan to Pay operates inside the Visa Pay framework, which theoretically connects participating digital wallets to Visa-accepting merchants globally across in-store and online channels.
The pitch: consumers can tap, scan, or pay online using their preferred payment apps with consistency across borders. T.R. Ramachandran, Head of Products and Solutions, Asia Pacific at Visa, framed the launch in forward-looking terms: “As commerce across Asia Pacific becomes increasingly mobile-first, Visa is leading the best way with innovations like Scan to Pay that speed up QR payment adoption.”
But let’s be precise about language here. Visa isn’t accelerating QR payment adoption—that acceleration happened organically over the past decade without Visa’s involvement. What Visa is definitely doing is retrofitting its network infrastructure to participate in a payment behaviour that already displaced traditional card transactions in multiple markets.
The partnership list reveals more by what’s missing
Marketing professionals should listen to who’s not on Visa’s partnership roster. Notice the absence of Alipay, WeChat Pay, GrabPay, Touch ‘n Go eWallet (dominant in Malaysia), Paytm, PhonePe, and many of the region’s highest-volume payment platforms.
This isn’t an oversight. These platforms built comprehensive ecosystems—payments, loyalty, merchant services, financial products—that compete directly with card networks. They’re not incentivised to develop into on-ramps for Visa transactions once they’ve already captured consumer payment behaviour independently.
The wallets Visa did secure partnerships with fall into predictable categories: bank-issued cards with digital wallets (Woori Card, Hyundai Card), telecommunications-adjacent platforms (VNPT Money), and smaller regional players.
Samsung Wallet’s inclusion across eight markets is notable, but Samsung’s payment ambitions have historically struggled to match its hardware success. What this partnership map actually reveals is Visa’s limited leverage in markets where it wasn’t first to unravel consumer payment friction.
The value proposition marketing teams should query
Visa’s announcement emphasises advantages that sound compelling in isolation but deserve scrutiny in context:
“Millions of merchants” can now accept these payments.
But what number of are latest to digital payment acceptance versus existing Visa merchants who can now also accept QR codes? The press release doesn’t make clear. If it’s primarily the latter, Visa isn’t expanding the digital payment ecosystem—it’s adding one other acceptance method to merchants who were already digitally enabled.
“Expanded acceptance for international visitors.”
This assumes tourists struggle to pay in Asia Pacific markets, which contradicts on-the-ground reality. International visitors already use Visa cards via contactless terminals. Why would they switch to QR codes? Do enough Korean tourists in Singapore use Hyundai Card’s QR function to justify merchant integration costs?
“Leverage existing QR infrastructure to cut back costs.”
This is where economics gets interesting. Merchants in markets like Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia already maintain QR acceptance for local schemes like PromptPay, VNPay, and DuitNow. Adding Visa QR means one other integration, one other reconciliation process, and presumably one other fee structure. The cost reduction claim only holds if Visa’s processing fees undercut local schemes—and Visa hasn’t disclosed pricing.
“Seamless experience at home and abroad.”
Local QR platforms already provide seamless domestic experiences. The cross-border component is Visa’s actual value proposition, nevertheless it only matters if consumers encounter meaningful friction using existing methods—and if the precise wallet partnerships Visa secured are those those consumers actually use.
For brands operating multi-market campaigns, the sensible query becomes: does this solve an issue your customers actually experience, or an issue Visa needs to unravel to stay relevant?
A defensive play in markets that moved on
Asia Pacific’s payment evolution tells a story of displacement, not complementary adoption. Unlike Western markets, where NFC-based contactless steadily supplemented card payments, many Asia Pacific consumers skipped cards entirely or relegated them to secondary payment methods.
This wasn’t a technology preference—it was a comprehensive value proposition. Platforms like Alipay, WeChat Pay, and GrabPay integrated payments with messaging, e-commerce, ride-hailing, food delivery, and financial services. They made QR payment adoption effortless by embedding it in each day digital behaviours that customers were already performing.
Visa built its empire on card infrastructure and terminal hardware. When consumers leapfrogged that paradigm, Visa found itself structurally disadvantaged. Merchants in Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines maintain payment acceptance infrastructure that usually prioritises local QR schemes over international card networks because that’s what drives transaction volume.
Perhaps, Visa Scan to Pay isn’t innovation—it’s adaptation. The company is actually acknowledging it may well’t reverse consumer behaviour, so it’s attempting to string its payment rails through the QR code infrastructure that won the market.
The strategic query isn’t whether Visa can technically enable these transactions—it clearly can. The query is whether or not merchants and consumers have any compelling reason to care when existing solutions already work efficiently.
The verdict: Competent execution of a defensive strategy
Visa’s QR payment adoption announcement demonstrates technical competence in adapting to markets that evolved without the corporate’s leadership. The partnerships are real, the technology functions, and the Singapore Fintech Festival demonstration will likely show smooth user experiences.
But marketing professionals should recognise this for what it’s: a payment network attempting to retrofit its infrastructure into consumer behaviours that already solved their very own problems years ago. The press release language—”expanding acceptance,” “accelerating adoption,” “leading the best way”—describes a reality that exists primarily in Visa’s communications strategy.
The actual story is more modest: Visa built one other on-ramp to its payment rails, secured partnerships with second-tier wallets that needed distribution, and is hoping merchant economics and consumer behaviour shift enough to make it relevant.
Will it work? That depends entirely on aspects Visa can’t control through press releases: comparative transaction fees, merchant promotional incentives, consumer awareness campaigns, and whether the precise wallet partnerships Visa secured actually reflect how people pay in each market.
For brands operating across Asia Pacific, this represents something to watch in transaction reports over the approaching quarters—not a catalyst for immediate strategy shifts. Watch for actual merchant adoption data, transaction volume trends, and comparative payment success rates before investing marketing resources in promoting these specific payment options.
The gap between “goes live” in a press release and “becomes relevant” in consumer behaviour can span years. Visa’s QR payment adoption push might eventually prove strategically sound, however the burden of proof rests with demonstrated market traction, not partnership announcements.
Marketing teams interested in understanding market-specific implementation details—or, more usefully, actual merchant adoption rates and transaction volume data—should press Visa’s regional teams for metrics beyond the vague “tens of millions of merchants” claim in the announcement.
In Asia Pacific’s payment landscape, incumbency doesn’t guarantee relevance. Visa is making the best moves to remain in the sport. Whether those moves translate to material market share stays an open, and truthfully sceptical, query.
See also: Social media is the centre of each marketing strategy
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