Jakarta. ASEAN member Vietnam will sign the bloc's regional payment connectivity pact on Friday, according to a senior official at the Indonesian central bank.

The ASEAN-5 -- Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines --  agreed to link their payment systems in an effort to boost economic integration last November. The signed memorandum of understanding (MoU) includes a deal on cross-border QR payment systems. 

For instance, an Indonesian citizen traveling to Thailand can pay for retail goods in Rupiah simply by scanning QR codes with the Quick Response Indonesian Standard (QRIS) system on their mobile phones. Thai travelers in Indonesia can also do the same with baht using Thailand’s QR payment apps. This bypasses the need to use American dollars as an intermediary. 

Indonesia will host the ASEAN Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting (AFMGM) in Jakarta on August 22-25. Regional payment linkage is expected to be high on the agenda. 

Iss Savitri Hafid, a director at Bank Indonesia, said that the four-day dialogue could see Vietnam finally ink ASEAN’s payment linkage deal.

“We hope that Vietnam will sign the ASEAN regional payment connectivity pact on August 25,” Iss told reporters in Jakarta on Monday.

“There were supposed to be two countries [who would sign the agreement] this week, but it turns out Vietnam was the only one who had completed the necessary processes. … Hopefully, another ASEAN member state would follow suit by the end of this year,” Iss said without going into details.

ASEAN is currently drafting a roadmap that lays out a timeline of when the remaining ASEAN members would join the regional payment connectivity initiative. Indonesia is also pushing for this roadmap to be announced in the upcoming AFMGM.

“When we speak of ‘regional payment connectivity’, it is not only limited to cross-border QR payments. There are other aspects to it such as fast payment, RTGS [real-time gross settlement], API [application programming interface], and data framework. But we are starting out with the QR payment integration first,” Iss said.

Indonesia has made QRIS use available in Malaysia and Thailand under the ASEAN payment linkage system. Just last week, Jakarta kicked off the QRIS trials in Singapore.

“The QRIS integration with Singapore is expected to come into force at a commercial level later this year,” Iss said.

Once Vietnam signs the payment linkage MoU, it will take some time before Hanoi reveals which of the ASEAN countries it chooses to trial the project with first. 

“So we still don’t know if Vietnam will try to connect their QR payment system with Indonesia's QRIS first or the other [ASEAN-5] nations."

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