Southeast Asia's Next Payments Shift Is Agentic Commerce: What Comes After QR Codes

The Inflection Point Beyond QR Codes

Trends: Agentic commerce next 'inflection point' in SE Asia's digital payments landscape

The payments industry is already looking beyond QR codes to agentic commerce, which stakeholders say could be the next major breakthrough in the sector.

theedgemalaysia.com

On June 8, 2026, the Malaysian business outlet The Edge Malaysia reported that Southeast Asia's payments industry is looking beyond QR codes to agentic commerce as its next inflection point. The core of the story is that the stakeholders themselves -- payment gateways, cross-border platforms, and international card networks -- are aligned in calling it the sector's next major breakthrough.

Agentic commerce here refers to a transaction model in which AI agents act on behalf of consumers and businesses to initiate, execute, and reconcile payments through open APIs, with little human intervention. What sets it apart from conventional online payments is not just finding and buying products, but processing the payment itself autonomously.

Why does this conversation matter for Southeast Asia now? The backdrop is a regional digital payments market reaching a turning point in its maturity. The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, cited in the article, projects that payment penetration across the ten ASEAN states will reach 73% of total gross transaction value (GTV) by 2030. The era of "cash is king" is drawing to a close.

Reading the Foundation QR Codes Built

Before turning to agentic commerce, it is worth understanding why Southeast Asia could become its proving ground. The answer lies in QR codes.

QR codes in Southeast Asia began as a peer-to-peer transfer tool. Today they have matured into unified national payment systems across all ten countries, including Myanmar's MMQR and Brunei's taurusQR. According to the article, cash as a share of GTV is expected to plummet from 39% in 2025 to 27% by 2030.

What stands out is how QR adoption has widened financial access for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Eng Sheng Guan, co-founder and CEO of payment gateway provider Fiuu, notes that people no longer need to carry cash and that street theft has declined as a result. The view that the benefits of digital transactions extend beyond convenience to public safety should not be overlooked.

This state of affairs -- where everyone has an e-wallet and knows how to use QR payments -- is the crucial part. Precisely because payment behavior has already shifted to digital, the next idea of removing the human from the transaction starts to feel plausible.

Cross-Border Rails Set the Stage

For agentic commerce to function at a regional scale, cross-border payment interoperability is essential. That groundwork is already advancing steadily.

At its center is the Regional Payment Connectivity (RPC) initiative. Founded in 2022 by five central banks, the framework has since expanded through Vietnam, Brunei, Laos, and Cambodia's entry in April 2025 into a structure signed by nine ASEAN central banks. A world is taking shape in which a Malaysian traveler can pay a street vendor in Bangkok or Jakarta as easily as in Kuala Lumpur.

The connected QR systems include Cambodia's KHQR, Indonesia's QRIS, Malaysia's DuitNow, the Philippines's QR Ph, Singapore's PayNow, Thailand's PromptPay, and Vietnam's VietQR. As of the end of 2025, 29 QR and person-to-person payment linkages were live within ASEAN and with external partners.

International card networks see this trend as complementary rather than threatening. Visa Malaysia explains that QR and cards coexist as a "multi-rail" ecosystem rather than competing. In fact, 82% of businesses reportedly cite a positive impact from card payments, including higher sales and larger ticket sizes. The recognition is that interoperability, not the superiority of any single payment method, is the key to supporting cross-border transactions.

The Biggest Barrier Is Trust, Not Technology

The story has been positive so far. Yet the article devotes the most space to the obstacle holding back adoption: the question of trust.

Consumer interest is building, but cautiously. A multi-country study by Worldpay cited in the article found that only about one in four shoppers would "never" use an AI agent, while 75% are ready to try it now or are persuadable. At the same time, most consumers expect AI to handle only around 20% of their transactions. In other words, agentic AI is viewed for now as a helper channel rather than a wholesale replacement for shopping behavior.

At the heart of these concerns is accountability. The industry has no clear answer yet to the question of who handles fraud, chargebacks, and post-transaction disputes once the human is removed from the chain.

Nakul Kothari, head of APAC and Middle East at cross-border platform JusPay, points to a precedent in India. When Visa and Mastercard introduced biometric authentication, they set strict limits -- transaction caps and frequency restrictions -- to build consumer confidence. His remark that "it's about setting up more guard rails" captures an industry that prioritizes control over maximizing automation.

Others emphasize the continued need for human oversight. Andrew Chim, head of Southeast Asia expansion at cross-border firm Airwallex, is deliberate about automating risk judgment. "We are very deliberate about where we let AI act autonomously. Judgement on risk is hard to define, and we are not at a point where an agent can unilaterally move large FX positions without human checks and balances," he says.

Fiuu's Eng likewise notes that even as AI reshapes the payment process, reliance on card networks and payment rails remains. Agentic AI will play a major role in helping customers transact, but it is still the existing networks that ultimately settle the payment.

The Myth of a Uniform Region

Behind the headline of an expanding cross-border network, the reality on the ground is far more complex. This point is especially important for e-commerce operators weighing entry into ASEAN.

JusPay's Nakul explains that each country maintains its own regulatory and payment-preference "nuances." Singapore is a card-heavy market, Indonesia is virtual-account-heavy, Malaysia is wallet-heavy, and Thailand is seeing the rise of real-time PromptPay. The reality that "Southeast Asia" cannot be treated as a single bloc is right here.

Licensing is another regulatory bottleneck. Fiuu's application for a payment license in Thailand took more than two and a half years, reflecting the complexity of local processes and language considerations. The rise of data sovereignty laws adds further burden: in markets like Indonesia and Thailand, where certain data must be hosted locally, companies are forced to open dedicated cloud nodes.

B2B transactions carry their own constraints. Airwallex's Chim notes that instant payment rails still face limits for large-scale B2B, such as low transaction caps and the absence of "maker-checker" approval workflows that separate the initiator from the approver. Because instant transfers are irreversible, there is no "undo" button if a single digit is mistyped on a massive payment.

What E-Commerce Operators Should Prepare For

Translating the article's themes into operational priorities makes the order of business clear.

First, optimize cross-border design country by country. Rather than offering a uniform set of payment methods, operators need options aligned with each local mainstream -- cards in Singapore, virtual accounts in Indonesia, wallets in Malaysia. MSME demand is not uniform either. A street vendor wants simple QR acceptance, while an online brand scaling across ten markets needs sophisticated infrastructure for multi-currency flows, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance.

Second, start agentic commerce from the design of trust. If you accept AI-agent-driven purchases on your own site, you must prepare in advance for transaction explainability, clear cancellation and return policies, and agent authentication. Given that consumers will entrust only about 20% of transactions to AI for the time being, a design that preserves room for human review is more realistic than excessive automation.

The shifting structure of merchant discount rates (MDR) is also worth watching. According to the e-Conomy SEA report, the weighted average MDR is declining by 0.05 percentage points a year. A 1% to 3% fee can no longer be justified by transaction processing alone, and differentiation through value-added services increasingly separates winners from losers.

Conclusion

Agentic commerce in Southeast Asia stands on the mature digital payments foundation that QR codes built. The cross-border network spanning nine countries, together with high penetration, is establishing the conditions for AI agent payments to work at a regional scale.

Yet what the stakeholders repeatedly stressed was not a limit of technology but a wall of trust. Where accountability sits, how regulations differ by country, and the continued need for human oversight -- how these are designed will shape this inflection point, expected to become reality within three years. For e-commerce operators eyeing ASEAN, the question now is not "when to automate" but the design philosophy itself: "how much human review to keep."