Most merchants think about payment acceptance as a settled utility decision — pick a provider, integrate once, move on. That assumption made sense when the acquiring landscape was stable and the differences between providers were mostly pricing and service quality. It no longer holds. The acquiring landscape across ASEAN has shifted structurally over the past several years, and merchants still treating their payment partner choice as a low-stakes utility decision are increasingly exposed to gaps they have not noticed yet. Cards now account for less than 15% of potential customers in most ASEAN markets, according to recent regional payments analysis — a figure that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when card rails were still the default acceptance backbone most acquiring relationships were built around.
The single-rail assumption is now the risk
For years, a merchant's core payment acceptance decision was largely about card processing, with alternative methods bolted on as afterthoughts. That ordering has reversed across most ASEAN markets. All ten ASEAN member states now operate national unified QR standards — DuitNow in Malaysia, QRIS in Indonesia, PromptPay in Thailand, QR Ph in the Philippines, VietQR in Vietnam, and equivalents in Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Brunei, and Myanmar — with eight of the ten already enabling cross-border interoperability between at least one other market. A merchant whose acceptance stack was built around card processing as the primary rail, with everything else added later as a patchwork, is running on infrastructure that no longer matches how their customers actually prefer to pay.
This matters commercially, not just technically. Checkout abandonment tied to missing a preferred payment method is one of the more measurable and avoidable sources of lost revenue a merchant can address, and it is precisely the kind of gap that a legacy, card-first acquiring relationship is structurally slow to close.
National QR interoperability changed the competitive question
The cross-border dimension of this shift is no longer theoretical. Malaysia alone recorded 11.8 million cross-border QR transactions worth RM967 million in the first half of 2025 — already surpassing the full-year total for 2024 — while Indonesia's QRIS system saw cross-border usage grow 225% over the same comparison period. The BIS Innovation Hub's Project Nexus, connecting the instant payment systems of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and India through a single hub-and-spoke gateway, is moving from pilot to production through 2026.
This has quietly changed what merchants should be evaluating an acquirer on. The relevant question is no longer simply "which payment methods does this provider support" but "how quickly and completely does this provider keep pace with interoperability standards as they expand," because a provider lagging behind national QR rollout is exporting that lag directly onto the merchant's checkout experience.
Non-bank acquirers have closed the service gap that used to favour banks
For most of the acquiring industry's history, banks held a structural advantage in acquiring relationships because merchants needed the settlement and regulatory relationship a bank could provide. Non-bank acquirers and payment facilitators have largely closed that gap — able to offer bank-grade settlement through partnership structures while providing meaningfully better integration speed, developer tooling, and merchant support than most banks have historically invested in for what is, for a bank, a lower-margin business line.
This has made the acquirer decision genuinely competitive in a way it was not a decade ago, but it has also made it harder for merchants to evaluate, because "non-bank acquirer" now covers a wide range of maturity and reliability, from well-capitalised regional players to thinly resourced entrants who may not be positioned to support a merchant through a genuine service disruption.
Cross-border merchants face a fragmented, not converging, landscape
A merchant operating across two or more ASEAN markets is often surprised to learn how little standardisation exists between them, even as cross-border QR linkages expand. Regulatory licensing, preferred payment rails, and settlement architecture differ meaningfully market to market — wallet-led markets like Indonesia and the Philippines settle through e-money providers' own books, while account-to-account-led markets like Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia settle through real-time bank transfer rails, an architectural difference with real consequences for fee structure, fraud exposure, and regulatory oversight. A single acquiring relationship that works cleanly in one country frequently requires a genuinely different technical and commercial arrangement in the next.
What merchants should actually be evaluating
The right acquirer evaluation today weighs three things that were secondary a decade ago: breadth and speed of adoption across e-wallet and real-time transfer rails, not just card processing; demonstrated pace in keeping up with each market's interoperability standards as they evolve, including the cross-border linkages now scaling through initiatives like Project Nexus; and, for any merchant operating regionally, actual in-market licensing and settlement capability rather than a thin technical integration layered over gaps. Merchants who treat their acquiring relationship as a settled utility decision, reviewed only when something breaks, are increasingly the ones discovering the gap only after a competitor with a more current acceptance stack has already captured the transaction they missed.