UnionPay QR

TypeQR Code

PrimaryCN

MentionedCN LA

Completeness86%high

UnionPay QR

Overview

UnionPay QR (often presented under the QuickPass / 云闪付 (Cloud QuickPass) brand) is China UnionPay's QR-code payment scheme, operated internationally by UnionPay International (UPI) CN. Its merchant-presented form is built on EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) — the same TLV container used by the broader national-QR family — so a UnionPay QR is, at the wire level, an EMVCo MPM payload carrying UnionPay's scheme identifier [emv]. UnionPay's card and acceptance network reaches 180+ countries and regions, and its QR acceptance rides on that same global footprint [cn-cro, upi].

China's domestic payment surface is dominated by Alipay and WeChat Pay; UnionPay QR is the bank-card-network entrant, and notably QR-code interoperability has been pursued between Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay CN.

UnionPay (China UnionPay, 中国银联) is the bank-card network founded in 2002 under the People's Bank of China, with UnionPay International established to run its overseas business [cn-cro, upi].

12 December 2015 — QuickPass launched in Beijing with over 20 Chinese commercial banks, originally as a contactless service centred on NFC/HCE/TSM and tokenisation technologies [7].

2016 — UnionPay QR Code payment launched [8]. The product extended the QuickPass brand from contactless cards to scannable EMVCo MPM merchant QR codes, positioning UnionPay's bank-card consortium as the bank industry's response to wallet-led Alipay and WeChat Pay [7, 8].

2017 — major-bank rollout. UnionPay partnered with all top-tier Chinese commercial banks — Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, ICBC and others — to roll the QR product into their mobile-banking apps [8].

11 December 2017 — Cloud QuickPass (云闪付) launched. UnionPay merged the legacy UnionPay app and UnionPay Wallet into a single consumer mobile + online payment app under the new "云闪付" (Cloud QuickPass / Yúnshǎnfù) brand [9]. The merged app supports QR-code payments, in-app online payments and NFC QuickPass contactless on a single credential, designed to compete directly with Alipay and WeChat Pay [9].

24 October 2018 — Cloud QuickPass Partners Programme launched at the inaugural Partners Conference in Wuhan; by 2018 the app had passed 100 million users [7, 8]. By Q1 2022 UnionPay reported 650 million UnionPay QR Code users [8].

2021 — international footprint reaches 33 QR-code countries (contactless: 51) [9]. By 2024 the merchant-acceptance picture inside China included 47 major cities with QR-enabled metro fare, buses across 1,500+ prefectures and counties, 550,000+ merchants, ~200,000 convenience stores and 300,000+ self-service terminals [8].

China's broader QR ecosystem reached interoperability between Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay, and a unified cross-border QR pilot launched in 2024 (reported at 427M CNY processed) CN. By June 2024 China counted 969 million mobile-payment users and a 38.3 % QR-payment penetration, the highest in the world CN.

Technical specification

UnionPay QR's merchant-presented form is an EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) payload [emv].

EMVCo MPM foundation [emv]:

Payload format: TLV (Tag-Length-Value) plain-text string, rendered as a qr-code symbol.
Payload Format Indicator (tag 00) = "01".
Integrity: CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE appended as the final field, tag 63.
Static and dynamic QR variants are supported by the MPM container.
Country Code carried in tag 58, Transaction Currency in tag 53, Merchant Name in tag 59, Merchant City in tag 60, Merchant Category Code (MCC) in tag 52.

UnionPay scheme identity [emv, cn-cro]:

UnionPay's scheme is identified by the EMV Application Identifier (AID) A000000333010101 (the registered application identifier under UnionPay's RID A000000333).
Inside an EMVCo MPM payload, a payment scheme occupies one Merchant Account Information template (tags 02–51), whose first sub-element is a Globally Unique Identifier (GUI) carrying the scheme AID.

Merchant-template tag — honest caveat: The exact tag number that UnionPay's merchant-account-information template occupies is not pinned by the public EMVCo example set — the published EMVCo MPM examples do not assign a fixed slot to UnionPay. By convention, and per UnionPay's documented reserved international-scheme slot, this is described as tag 15 CN. The interactive playground on this page therefore uses tag 15 with GUI A000000333010101 purely to illustrate the EMVCo MPM container shape for a UnionPay-branded code; it should be read as "conventionally / per UnionPay sub-spec," not as a value lifted from the public EMVCo example set.

**Defaults used by the

Use cases

Merchant-presented retail QR — a printed or POS-displayed EMVCo MPM code that any UnionPay-enabled wallet (Cloud QuickPass and partner bank apps) can scan to pay [emv, cn-cro].
Cross-border acceptance — UnionPay's 180+ country/region acceptance network extends to QR acceptance, making UnionPay QR a tool for Chinese cardholders abroad and for inbound acceptance of UnionPay credentials [cn-cro, upi].
Interoperable domestic QR — within China, QR-code interoperability has been pursued between Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay, so a single merchant code can be scanned across schemes CN.
Embedded inside other national QR schemes — UnionPay merchant-account-information templates also appear inside India's bharat-qr, which carries Visa, Mastercard, RuPay and UnionPay templates in one EMVCo MPM code.

China-market context CN:

969 million mobile-payment users (June 2024)
38.3 % QR-payment penetration (world-leading)
Unified cross-border QR pilot launched 2024 (427M CNY reported)

UnionPay QR's merchant-presented form is a standard EMVCo MPM payload; the UnionPay-specific part is the AID A000000333010101 inside a merchant-account-information template (tag 26-51 sub-tag 00) [emv]. There is no UnionPay-branded open-source encoder; the implementation surface is the EMVCo-MPM library ecosystem with the UnionPay AID configured.

Generic EMVCo-MPM encoder/decoder libraries — populate a tag-26 (or other 26-51) MAI template with sub-tag 00 = A000000333010101 to emit a UnionPay-acceptance code:

Repo	Language	Stars	License	Last release	Notes
mvallim/emv-qrcode	Java	128	Apache-2.0	v0.1.5, May 2026	Full MPM v1.1 + CPM v1.1 encode/decode with CRC16 + duplicate-tag checks; "production ready (uses in several projects)" per README [10]
mercari/go-emv-code	Go	70	MIT	v0.1.5, Aug 2023	Encoder/decoder for both Merchant- and Consumer-Presented modes; built by Mercari for its payments stack — production-grade Go reference [11]
dongri/emv-qrcode	Go	58	—	2024	Independent Go MPM/CPM encoder/parser [12]

UnionPay's own integration paths (closed-source):

UnionPay International Developer Portal — In-store QR Code Payment product covers merchant-presented and consumer-presented flows for cross-border UnionPay QR acceptance [upi-dev].
Cloud QuickPass (云闪付) app — the consumer wallet that issues UnionPay QR for sending and scans EMVCo MPM merchant codes (including the interoperable Alipay/WeChat/UnionPay QR codes) [7, 9].

UnionPay QR also appears as a template inside multi-scheme national QR codes (notably India's bharat-qr), where the same AID A000000333010101 is co-embedded alongside Visa, Mastercard and RuPay templates in one EMVCo MPM code.

Comparison

vs. emvco-mpm — UnionPay QR is a branded profile of EMVCo MPM, not a separate wire format. The container, CRC, and tag grammar are EMVCo's; UnionPay contributes the scheme AID A000000333010101 and (per its sub-spec) a reserved merchant-template slot.

vs. alipay-qr / wechat-pay-qr — Alipay and WeChat Pay are wallet-native QR schemes that historically used their own proprietary payloads and dominate the Chinese consumer market (92 % / 85 % preference) CN. UnionPay QR is the bank-card-network scheme; the three have pursued QR interoperability so merchants need not maintain three separate codes CN.

vs. bharat-qr — Bharat QR is a multi-scheme EMVCo MPM code carrying several card-network templates at once, including a UnionPay template. UnionPay QR is the single-scheme expression of the same UnionPay template; Bharat QR shows it composed alongside Visa/Mastercard/RuPay.

Fun facts

Card-network-first path to QR ubiquity. UnionPay is one of the largest card networks in the world by cards issued, and its acceptance footprint of 180+ countries and regions means a UnionPay QR rides the same rails that already accept UnionPay cards [cn-cro, upi] — the opposite of the wallet-first paths Alipay and WeChat Pay took. By Q1 2022 UnionPay reported 650 million UnionPay QR Code users, a scale built largely through bank-app distribution rather than a single dominant super-app [8].

A single physical merchant QR in China can be scheme-agnostic. Thanks to Alipay / WeChat Pay / UnionPay QR interoperability, one EMVCo MPM code can route across all three rails — three of the largest payment networks on earth resolving to one printed sticker CN.

An eight-year retrofit from contactless to QR to merger. UnionPay's QuickPass brand launched 12 December 2015 as a contactless (NFC/HCE) product; the QR-code form arrived in 2016; the two were merged with the legacy UnionPay app/wallet into the unified Cloud QuickPass (云闪付) app on 11 December 2017 — almost exactly two years to the day after the original QuickPass launch [7, 9]. The mid-2018 Wuhan Partners Conference then made the consortium a co-marketing programme across 20+ banks [7].

Status

Active. UnionPay QR operates as part of the QuickPass / Cloud QuickPass ecosystem and rides UnionPay International's global acceptance network [cn-cro, upi]. China's QR-payment market continues to lead the world in penetration (38.3 %, 969M mobile-payment users as of June 2024), with a unified cross-border QR pilot active since 2024 CN. No deprecation is indicated.

Sources

Deployments

Found in the following country reports (grep across reports/countries/):

CN — CN-china.md

Deployments

Found in the following country reports (grep across reports/countries/):

CN — CN-china.md
LA — LA-laos.md