Why Countries Pay Differently: Cards, QR Codes, and the Decisions Behind Them

The US and Australia kept their card systems. China and Indonesia built new ones — and ended up with completely different outcomes.

Jason K Hanani

9/16/20268 min read

Every country moving away from cash faced the same basic choice: adopt a payment method, and decide who gets to run it. The technology on offer — cards, QR codes, tap-to-pay — turns out to matter less than two other things: how long the previous system had already been in place, and whether a regulator stepped in to shape what replaced it, or chose not to.

Four regions make the pattern visible. The United States and Australia both had card payments locked in for decades before any alternative existed, and both simply upgraded those cards rather than replacing them. China and Indonesia started from almost nothing — thin card usage, heavy reliance on cash — and both moved to QR-code payments. But QR in China and QR in Indonesia are not the same story. One was built by private companies with no oversight until the government stepped in years later. The other was designed by the central bank from day one specifically to prevent that from happening. Same technology, same starting point, opposite outcome.

A brief history of how each system took hold

The United States built its card system slowly. BankAmericard — the predecessor to Visa — launched in 1958 and had reached 61,000 merchants across 42 states within eight years. Mastercard's predecessor followed in 1966. By the time smartphones made new payment methods technically possible, around 2007, the US had already spent roughly fifty years building a card system that banks, merchants, and consumers were all deeply invested in.

Australia followed a similar, if shorter, path. Cards were already the dominant way Australians paid well before contactless technology existed. When tap-to-pay became available, it layered onto a payment habit that had already been building for decades — not a replacement, an upgrade.

China's story starts much later and moves faster. Alipay launched in 2004, WeChat Pay in 2013, both arriving at a moment when card ownership in China was still thin. There was no decades-old card habit to displace — just a gap that QR-code wallets filled quickly, on top of very little existing infrastructure at all.

Indonesia's shift didn't build up gradually the way any of the other three did. Bank Indonesia launched QRIS — a single, unified QR code standard — in August 2019, and made it mandatory for all payment providers by the end of that year. Where the other three countries' systems are the product of years or decades of accumulated habit, Indonesia's is the product of one decision, made at one point in time.

That difference in how much time each system had to become the default is the first variable that explains what happened next. But it isn't the only one.

The United States and Australia: regulators left the existing system alone

Cards were already so entrenched in the US and Australia that replacing them outright was never a realistic option. What's easy to overlook is that leaving cards in place was also a choice — regulators in both countries could have mandated a public alternative the way Indonesia later did. They didn't. The US and Australia both regulated around the existing card system — fee caps, rules about surcharging — rather than building something new to compete with it.

The Federal Reserve's most recent payments study found that cards accounted for close to four out of every five noncash payments in the US by number in 2024. A separate Federal Reserve survey, which asks individual consumers to log their own payments rather than counting transactions across the whole economy, found a similar but not identical split: about a third of consumer payments by credit card, another third by debit card, and cash trailing behind both. Different methods, same basic picture — cards are still how most people pay.

Australia tells the same story with sharper detail. In 2022, cards were used for 76 percent of all consumer payments, and cash had fallen to 13 percent. Nearly all of those card payments — 94 to 95 percent — were contactless. That's the upgrade path in miniature: the card stayed the same underlying system, it just got faster to use. Tapping a phone to pay in the US or Australia still means a card network is doing the work behind the scenes — Apple Pay and Google Pay don't move money on their own, they store a tokenized version of an existing Visa or Mastercard credential and hand it off to the same network a physical card would use. The phone changed; the system moving the money didn't.

What's more interesting is what didn't happen. QR-code payments, the same technology that took over in China and Indonesia, were fully available in Australia too. They just never caught on. A 2025 survey found only about 10 percent of Australians had used a QR code to pay in the past year, and most said it felt less convenient than simply tapping a card. Nearly a decade after QR payments became technically possible everywhere, Australians tried it and largely preferred what they already had.

China and Indonesia: the same starting point, two different regulators

China and Indonesia both had the opposite condition — a payment system genuinely worth replacing, because so little was built yet. That's what made a QR-code leap possible in both places, and it also needed one more thing to actually happen: a smartphone cheap and common enough that most people already had one. Affordable Android phones spread quickly across both countries in the early 2010s, right as Alipay, WeChat Pay, and later QRIS needed exactly that device in people's pockets to work at all. What determined the outcome, once phones and thin card usage were both in place, was what each country's regulator did with the opening.

In China, nobody decided anything for the first several years. Alipay and WeChat Pay built their QR-wallet systems and grew rapidly, connecting directly to individual banks with no central oversight. By some counts, the two platforms eventually handled more than 90 percent of China's mobile payments, operating largely outside the central bank's view.

That changed starting in 2017. China's central bank issued a notice in August of that year requiring all third-party payment companies to route their transactions through a new, centrally supervised clearing system instead of connecting directly to banks. The migration deadline was that October; full enforcement began the following June. By January 2019, payment companies were required to hold all customer funds in centrally supervised accounts, closing off a source of income they'd previously kept for themselves. What had been an unregulated, privately built system became a state-supervised one — not by replacing the technology, but by taking control of what sat behind it.

Indonesia never went through that unregulated period at all. Before QRIS existed, Indonesian merchants were dealing with the same fragmentation problem other countries eventually ran into — each bank and digital wallet had its own incompatible QR code, meaning shops needed a wall of different codes just to accept payment. Bank Indonesia's response was to design one standard from the outset and require every licensed payment provider to use it. The stated goal, in the central bank's own words, was to make QR payments interoperable across every provider and prevent exactly the kind of fragmentation, or single-platform dominance, that China spent years correcting after the fact.

The results, as of mid-2026, are large: over 65 million users, nearly 45 million merchants — the vast majority small or micro businesses — and transaction value up almost 90 percent year over year. Bank Indonesia has also used pricing directly as a policy lever. Micro merchants pay no fee at all on QR transactions up to Rp500,000; starting in October 2026, that zero-fee tier extends to every merchant category for transactions up to Rp100,000. It's an active, ongoing example of a regulator using fees to keep pushing adoption, not a decision made once in 2019 and left alone.

Both countries' apps have since added a way to pay by tapping a phone instead of scanning a code — Alipay in 2024, Indonesia's QRIS in 2025. It's worth noting only because it shows that how someone physically pays and what actually moves the money behind the scenes are two separate questions. A tap on Alipay or QRIS doesn't touch a card network at all — it's still authorizing a transfer from a wallet balance or a linked bank account, the same way scanning always did. The gesture changed; what's moving the money didn't.

That's the real contrast with the US and Australia. All four countries now have some version of tap-to-pay, and on the surface the gesture looks identical. But a tap in the US or Australia is still routed through a card network. A tap in China or Indonesia never touches one — it runs on bank accounts and e-wallet balances instead. Scanning a code is still how most people pay in China and Indonesia today; nothing here suggests that's changing. What changed is who's in charge of the system underneath, and that's the part the tap-to-pay feature doesn't touch at all.

What having little to displace explains, and what it doesn't

China and Indonesia both had a real opening because so little was already built. That's the necessary condition — without it, replacing cash isn't realistic, the same way it wasn't in the US or Australia. But having an opening doesn't determine what fills it. It doesn't decide whether a private company builds something first and a regulator corrects it later, or whether the regulator designs the replacement from the start. That part is a separate decision, made independently of how much room there was to make it.

It's also worth being precise about what "little to displace" doesn't guarantee. Plenty of places with the same thin card infrastructure and heavy cash reliance haven't moved to QR payments at all — having room to build something new isn't the same as anyone actually building it. QR took hold in China and Indonesia because platforms and a regulator, respectively, actually did the work of building and pushing a replacement. Elsewhere, absent that active push, things just stay as they are.

The pattern, restated simply

A country's payment default comes down to two things: how long the old system had already been locked in, and a decision — active or passive — about who gets to control whatever replaces it. The country that goes furthest fastest isn't the one with the newest technology. It's the one where something old had genuinely little time to become permanent, and somebody made a deliberate choice about what took its place.

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Jason Kester Hanani

Operations & Product Professional

contact@jasonkhanani.com