Asia Pacific continues to set the pace for digital payments. Wallets, QR, instant payments and embedded finance are no longer emerging capabilities, they are reshaping how banks, merchants and consumers interact every day. As institutions enter 2026, several trends are accelerating across the region that are directly shaping digital banking strategies, core system modernisation and the future of client experiences.
Having lived through the 2025 year, we’d like to provide here our own predictions for 2026 for APAC payments market. What from BPC point of view are the trends and product features to watch.
Market Insight
Asia Pacific remains the world’s most dominant region for digital wallet usage. Deloitte’s analysis on cross-border payments finds that APAC accounts for nearly two-thirds of global digital wallet spend, valued at around US$9.8 trillion, the highest of any region globally.
Telecom Review Asia also reports that wallet adoption continues to outpace card usage in multiple APAC markets, while QR-based payment usage is expanding across physical and digital commerce.
What This Means for Banks
Digital wallets are becoming the primary payment channel across APAC, reshaping how customers access financial services and how banks must design their platforms. For many users, wallets and super-apps now sit ahead of traditional bank channels, changing how products are discovered, used and valued.
To remain relevant, banks need to prioritise enablement over channel ownership. Cards, accounts and credit products must integrate into third-party platforms through APIs, rather than relying on proprietary apps. Wallets also bring together a wider mix of digital instruments, including tokenised and virtual cards, prepaid balances, QR credentials, transit passes and loyalty assets, requiring flexible issuing systems that avoid product silos.
As outlined in BPC’s guide on building closed-loop and open-loop wallet ecosystems, engagement in wallets is driven by embedded value. Rewards, instalments, contextual credit and seamless payments now matter more than drawing users back to bank-owned channels, shifting the focus to platforms that can operate effectively across different wallet models.
Where BPC Fits
SmartVista allows banks to participate in a wallet-led market without redesigning their core systems. It provides a unified way to issue and manage digital instruments such as tokenised and virtual cards, accounts and QR credentials, helping banks support a wide range of wallet use cases.
Through API-first integration, SmartVista enables payments, instalments, loyalty features and account services to be embedded directly into super-apps and partner ecosystems. The platform supports cards, QR, real-time payments and account-to-account transactions, ensuring consistent processing across payment types and channels.
Market Insight
Cross-border QR payments have accelerated far beyond pilot programmes and are now forming part of ASEAN’s regional payment connectivity agenda. A recent policy analysis from PS-Engage highlights the expansion of QR linkages across Southeast Asia, including such as PayNow–PromptPay (Singapore–Thailand), DuitNow–PromptPay (Malaysia–Thailand), PayNow–DuitNow (Singapore–Malaysia), QRIS–PromptPay (Indonesia–Thailand).The report suggests that Malaysia recorded 11.8 million cross-border QR transactions in 1H 2025, already surpassing the previous year’s total, a strong signal of scale and consumer adoption.
Central banks across ASEAN are positioning cross-border QR as a mechanism to reduce reliance on foreign currencies, promote local-currency settlement, and enable lower-cost regional payments for both consumers and SMEs.
What This Means for Banks
The rise of cross-border QR payments is moving banks from serving domestic-only transactions to supporting regional payment corridors that rely on interoperability and real-time processing. Banks should handle QR standards from multiple countries, each with its own data formats, routing rules and settlement processes. While for merchants, banks must ensure foreign wallet acceptance is consistent and transparent, with clear reconciliation and predictable fees. Compliance adds another layer of complexity, as each corridor comes with its own expectations around AML, disclosures, disputes and reporting. At the customer level, banks need to offer a seamless payment experience, whether a local user is paying abroad or an inbound traveller is using their home-country wallet.
Where BPC Fits
SmartVista provides banks and acquirers with the infrastructure needed to support cross-border QR payments at scale. It enables multi-scheme QR acceptance, automatically handling different formats, routing and scheme rules across domestic systems.
The platform supports real-time FX, multi-currency settlement and accurate reconciliation for regional corridors, while managing both inbound and outbound QR flows, including authentication and risk checks. For acquiring banks, built-in merchant tools simplify onboarding, fee setup and reconciliation for foreign wallet acceptance.
Market Insight
The acceleration of digital payments has been matched by a rise in sophisticated fraud attacks across Asia Pacific. BioCatch highlights that 54% of all confirmed fraud cases in the region are now scam-related, with sharp spikes in voice scams, remote-access attacks and authorised push payment (APP) fraud.
Aon’s 2025 Global Cyber Risk Report points to a worsening threat landscape, noting a 53% rise in social-engineering incidents and a 233% increase in related claims across APAC. This trend is heavily influenced by attackers using AI-generated voice and video manipulation to impersonate bank staff, relationship managers or government authorities.
Regulators in Singapore, India, Australia and Hong Kong have issued multiple directives aimed at curbing scam losses, including requirements for stronger authentication, real-time monitoring, mandatory cooling-off periods, and coordinated responses across banks and telcos.
What This Means for Banks
Traditional rule-based monitoring is no longer sufficient. Banks must detect risk not only at the transaction level but at the session, behavioural and identity layers. Social-engineering scams, where customers are manipulated into authorising transactions, require banks to analyse behavioural deviations, device signals and session anomalies in real time.
The growth of real-time payments reduces the window for manual intervention. Banks need automated controls that can flag unusual behaviour within milliseconds, supported by strong profiling, device fingerprinting and continuous authentication, as well as proactive real-time fraud prevention.
Where BPC Fits
SmartVista’s AI-powered Fraud Management helps banks detect and prevent fraud across digital and physical channels by analysing behaviour, devices and transaction patterns in real time. Operating across issuing, acquiring, wallets and real-time payments, it provides a unified view of fraud risk, reducing blind spots and strengthening protection across all payment channels.
For example, Co-opbank Pertama in Malaysia partnered with BPC to deploy SmartVista Fraud Management across its mobile and internet banking platforms to meet stricter Bank Negara Malaysia security requirements and enhance customer protection. Through this collaboration, CBP integrated machine-learning-driven monitoring and behavioural profiling into its digital channels, enabling real-time transaction analysis and stronger defence against suspicious activity, improving both compliance and customer trust.
Market Insight
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has grown into one of Asia Pacific’s most widely adopted consumer credit channels, particularly among younger demographics and under-served segments. According to the Asia Pacific Buy Now Pay Later Service Market report the regional BNPL market is valued at US$155.72 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$335.04 billion by 2029, representing a 16.56% CAGR.
This growth is driven by e-commerce expansion, marketplace adoption, wallet integration and the rise of instalment-based checkout experiences across retail, travel and services. At the same time, regulators in Australia, Singapore, India and Malaysia are moving toward clearer rules on affordability checks, disclosures and consumer protection, signalling a shift toward more structured credit models.
What This Means for Banks
BNPL and embedded credit are changing how consumers access short-term financing, pushing banks to treat instalments as a built-in credit capability rather than a standalone product. Instalments must be available not only at checkout, but also before and after purchase and within wallet environments, where customers expect instant decisions and clear repayment terms.
To support this, banks need lending tools that enable real-time eligibility checks, flexible repayment plans, merchant-funded offers and seamless integration with merchant and wallet platforms. At the same time, tighter regulation means responsible lending must be embedded into BNPL flows through affordability checks, spending limits and clear disclosures. Banks that modernise both their lending and payment infrastructure will be better positioned to compete with fintech-led BNPL services across digital channels.
Where BPC Fits
SmartVista gives banks the flexibility to introduce BNPL and embedded credit features without building parallel systems. The platform allows banks to create and manage instalment plans, deferred payment options and merchant-specific promotional offers, all configurable through a central credit engine. It also supports real-time eligibility checks and repayment scheduling, enabling banks to offer credit decisions instantly at checkout or within partner wallets and marketplaces. Merchant-funded discounting and dynamic fee structures can be applied easily, allowing banks to tailor BNPL programmes for different partners or segments.
Market Insight
Asia Pacific’s payments landscape is becoming more fragmented as domestic schemes, real-time payment systems, wallets, QR networks and international card rails all grow in parallel. McKinsey’s 2025 Global Payments Report described this shift as a move toward “competing systems”, where different payment rails coexist and compete for consumer and merchant adoption. It is estimated that global payments revenues are to reach US$2.5 trillion with major share captured by account-to-account payments, instant payments and wallet-based transactions. These trends are particularly strong in APAC, where governments and regulators play an active role in accelerating alternative rails such as RTP systems, domestic card schemes and interoperable QR networks.
What This Means for Banks
Banks now operate in an environment where no single payment rail dominates, and each one comes with its own formats, rules, settlement cycles and compliance expectations. Legacy systems designed around card-first or batch-based processing struggle to meet these expectations. Banks need platforms capable of managing real-time execution, rich data formats like ISO 20022 , configurable routing and multi-rail settlement across channels. At the same time, business teams need flexibility to introduce new use cases, recurring payments, request-to-pay, cross-border QR, tokenised instruments, without large system rewrites.
Where BPC Fits
BPC’s SmartVista platform consolidates issuing, acquiring, switching and real-time processing within a single modular architecture, enabling support for cards, QR, account-to-account and instant payments in parallel. This allows banks and payment providers to introduce new payment models without reworking core banking or legacy card systems, while maintaining a unified operational and risk view.
This approach underpins BPC’s work with GCash in the Philippines, where SmartVista powers GCash PocketPay within the GCash for Business ecosystem. Using a single acquiring stack, GCash supports contactless card acceptance alongside closed-loop and national QR payments on Android devices, expanding merchant acceptance while keeping payments and risk management aligned across channels.
Final Thoughts
By 2026, success in APAC will depend less on launching new payment rails and more on how well banks support wallet-led ecosystems. Digital wallets will act as the main entry point for payments and financial services, while banks increasingly operate in the background, providing products, processing and risk management.
This shift will push banks to modernise legacy systems so cards, accounts, QR and instant payments work together by design. At the same time, always-on payments will leave little room for after-the-fact controls, making real-time, behaviour-based fraud prevention essential. Banks that modernise both their payment platforms and fraud capabilities will be best positioned to scale wallet partnerships and compete in a wallet-first APAC market.