Standards/qris
QRIS
Overview
QRIS (Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard) is Indonesia's unified national QR payment standard, jointly issued by Bank Indonesia (BI) and the Indonesian Payment System Association (ASPI) [1, 2]. It was launched on 17 August 2019 — Indonesia's 74th Independence Day — and became mandatory across the payment industry on 31 December 2019 [1, 3]. The standard is EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) based, with Indonesia-specific extensions for the country's bank + e-wallet + state-bank-fragmented market [1, 4]. By end-2025 it had 59 million users and 42 million merchants (~90 % of which are MSMEs), processing 13.66 billion transactions in 2025 — more than 2× Bank Indonesia's original 6.5 B target. BI's "17-8-45" 2026 strategy targets 17 B annual transactions, 8 cross-border partner countries, and 45 M merchants ID.
Indonesia introduced QRIS Tap (NFC variant) in March 2025, adding tap-to-pay capability alongside the QR scanning ID.
History
In 2018–2019 Bank Indonesia and ASPI ran a two-phase pilot of the QRIS specification: phase 1 (September–November 2018) and phase 2 (April–May 2019) [1]. The pilot validated technical interoperability across Indonesia's fragmented payment landscape — state banks (Mandiri, BRI, BNI), private banks (BCA), and a thriving e-wallet sector (GoPay, OVO, Dana, LinkAja, ShopeePay) ID.
- 17 August 2019 — official QRIS launch, coinciding with Indonesia's 74th Independence Day.
- 31 December 2019 — QRIS mandatory: all QR payment service providers in Indonesia must accept QRIS.
- 25 February 2022 — Bank Indonesia issues PADG No. 24/1/PADG/2022 amending the implementation regulation (PADG No. 21/18/PADG/2019).
- March 2025 — QRIS Tap (NFC variant) launched ID.
- August 2025 — Japan becomes first non-ASEAN country with QRIS cross-border live ID.
Pre-QRIS landscape: Indonesia had ~40 different QR payment standards in production by 2018, with each major bank and e-wallet running its own QR — a fragmentation problem QRIS was designed explicitly to solve [5].
Technical specification
QRIS adopts EMVCo's Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) QR specification with Indonesia-specific customisations [1, 4].
EMVCo MPM foundation [4]:
- Payload format: TLV (Tag-Length-Value) plain-text string
- Integrity: CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE appended as field
63 - Underlying symbology: qr-code (ISO/IEC 18004)
- Currency code: 360 (IDR)
Modes supported [1]:
- MPM Statis (Merchant-Presented Mode, Static) — fixed printed QR, customer enters amount.
- MPM Dinamis (Merchant-Presented Mode, Dynamic) — QR already contains the transaction amount; faster and reduces input error.
- CPM (Consumer-Presented Mode) — consumer's app displays a QR scanned by merchant POS.
Implementation regulation: Peraturan Anggota Dewan Gubernur (PADG) No. 21/18/PADG/2019 as amended by PADG No. 24/1/PADG/2022 [1].
MDR (Merchant Discount Rate) tiers ID:
| Merchant type | MDR |
|---|---|
| Regular merchants | 0.7 % |
| Micro merchants (UMI) — transactions < IDR 500K | 0 % |
| Education / Government | 0 % |
| Social / Donations | 0 % |
The zero-MDR-for-micro tier is structural — it removes the cost-of-acceptance barrier for the small-vendor segment that comprises 92.5 % of merchants ID.
Use cases
QRIS spans essentially all retail payment contexts in Indonesia:
- MSME merchants — 38 million micro / small / medium enterprises display printed static QRIS at warungs (small shops), warteg (cheap eateries), street food carts, market stalls. The zero MDR for sub-IDR-500K transactions is the policy lever that drove this scale ID.
- Modern retail — dynamic QRIS at chain supermarket POS (Indomaret, Alfamart), shopping malls, restaurants.
- E-commerce — server-generated dynamic QRIS at checkout; consumer pays via GoPay/OVO/Dana/etc.
- Government services and tax payments — zero MDR.
- Educational institutions — tuition fee collection, zero MDR.
- Social / religious donations — mosque and church donation collection.
- Cross-border tourism — outbound for Indonesian tourists in SG/MY/TH/JP/CN/KR; inbound for tourists from those countries ID.
Adoption rate (Q1 2024 → Q1 2025) ID:
| Metric | Q1 2024 | Q1 2025 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | 48 M | 56.3 M | +17 % |
| Merchants | 32 M | 38.1 M | +19 % |
| Quarterly transactions | — | 2.6 B | — |
Implementations
QRIS integration is mediated by Bank Indonesia–licensed Payment Service Providers (banks and e-wallets), so open-source library availability is limited — production integration goes through bank/PSP APIs.
Production wallets and apps ID:
- GoPay (~50 M+ users)
- OVO (~40 M+ users, Grab partnership)
- Dana (~30 M+ users, Ant Group-backed)
- LinkAja (~20 M+ users, state consortium)
- ShopeePay (Shopee ecosystem)
- BCA Mobile / myBCA, BRImo, Livin' by Mandiri, BNI Mobile Banking, OCTO Mobile (bank apps)
Vendor / acquirer SDKs:
- BRI API —
qris-merchant-presented-mode-mpm-dynamic-notification— official Bank Rakyat Indonesia developer docs for QRIS MPM Dynamic integration [7]. - Antom (Ant Group's international payment platform) — provides QRIS-as-a-payment-method for international merchants accepting Indonesian customers [8].
General EMVCo MPM libraries that can read QRIS payloads (since QRIS is EMVCo MPM with Indonesia-specific tag values): [thalesog/pix-utils] for the Brazilian variant of the same EMVCo family; any compliant TLV decoder works at the data-format level.
The ecosystem gap (no widely-starred open-source QRIS encoder library, unlike Pix or PromptPay) reflects that QRIS is operationally bank/wallet-mediated rather than self-served by merchants.
Comparison
vs. sgqr (Singapore) and duitnow-qr (Malaysia) and promptpay-qr (Thailand) — Same EMVCo MPM family; same era (all 2018–2019 launches); same central-bank-affiliated operator pattern. The key differentiator is merchant composition: QRIS is the most MSME-heavy of the four (92.5 % micro/small), reflecting Indonesia's economic structure. All four are connected in the ASEAN cross-border QR network and QRIS extended first beyond ASEAN to Japan in August 2025 [id-cro, sg-cro, my-cro, th-cro].
vs. pix (Brazil) — Both are state-led mandatory national payment standards. Pix is bank-rail-only with instant settlement (~10 seconds); QRIS works across banks AND e-wallets, with settlement timing dependent on the specific scheme. Pix charges merchants ~0.33 %; QRIS uses a tiered MDR with 0 % for micro and 0.7 % for regular [pix-ref, id-cro].
vs. upi-qr (India) — UPI uses a upi://pay?... deep link; QRIS uses EMVCo TLV. QRIS includes the e-wallet sector as first-class participants from launch; UPI was bank-account-only until later PPI (prepaid payment instrument) onboarding. Both achieved MSME-merchant ubiquity within ~5 years of launch [in-cro, id-cro].
Fun facts
QRIS's transaction volume grew by 226 %+ in 2024 ID — a multi-year-running case of the steepest national QR adoption curves on record, alongside Brazil's Pix and Malaysia's DuitNow.
In 2025 the United States Trade Representative formally labelled QRIS as a non-tariff trade barrier in its annual report on foreign trade obstacles — apparently because the mandatory standard's geo-restrictions disadvantage non-Indonesian wallet providers (US-headquartered card networks, Western fintechs) in serving Indonesian merchants [10, id-cro]. Bank Indonesia's response framed this as a payment-system sovereignty issue.
QRIS launched on 17 August 2019, Indonesia's 74th Independence Day [1] — a deliberately symbolic choice. The system was promoted as digital-economy independence: an Indonesian-controlled standard replacing dependence on foreign card networks (Visa, Mastercard) and foreign wallets (Alipay, WeChat).
38 million Indonesian merchants display a QRIS sticker ID. That's roughly one QRIS merchant per 7 Indonesian residents (or per 4 working-age residents) — among the highest QR-acceptance densities in the world.
Status
Active, mandatory, and rapidly expanding domestically and internationally. Most recent metrics:
- 56.3 M users; 38.1 M merchants (Q1 2025) ID
- 2.6 B quarterly transactions (Q1 2025) ID
- 226 % YoY 2024 transaction growth ID
QRIS Tap (NFC variant) live since March 2025, with iOS support planned ID. Cross-border footprint:
- Active: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan (Aug 2025) ID
- MoU / pilot: South Korea (Aug 2024), UAE (Aug 2024), China (2025 target) ID
Bank Indonesia's Payment System Blueprint 2025–2030 positions QRIS as the canonical retail payment rail for the next half-decade. No deprecation planned; the standard is foundational national infrastructure ID.
Sources
- QRIS — Bank Indonesia
- QRIS — ASPI
- QRIS — Wikipedia
- EMV QR Code Specifications — EMVCo
- Indonesia national QR launch — NFCW
- Bank Indonesia launches QR standard — Jakarta Post
- BRI QRIS MPM Dynamic Notification — Developer Docs
- QRIS Indonesia Payment Guide — Antom
- thalesog/pix-utils — adaptable EMVCo MPM library
- US labels QRIS a trade barrier — The Conversation
- ID-indonesia.md
Deployments
Found in the following country reports (grep across reports/countries/):
- ID — ID-indonesia.md
- JP — JP-japan.md
- MY — MY-malaysia.md
- SG — SG-singapore.md
- TH — TH-thailand.md