Money transfer systems using quick response (QR) codes are becoming increasingly popular for their ease and convenience of use. However, banks, payment intermediaries, and goods and service providers have been building their own technological standards which do not necessarily link up together. As such, the issue has created many difficulties and become inconvenient for users, businesses, and app operators.

As its customers are mostly young people, this RoyalTea shop accepts QR code as a method of payment. However, they have had to provide several different QR codes as each code can only be used by a particular bank. The inconsistency of paying with QR codes is only repeating the previous issues of credit cards payments, whereby each bank had a card alliance and as such certain cards could not be used with ATMs or POSs of other banks. Currently, the central bank has instructed the National Payment Cooperation of Vietnam to develop infrastructure that ensures linkage across banks, payment intermediaries, international payment organisations, and international card organisations so as to provide a smooth operation of QR code payment services in Vietnam. As to when the QR code payment can be used synchronously is still unknown. However, while these barriers continue to exist, customers will prefer to pay for their transactions via cash, which goes against the nation’s efforts towards a non-cash society. –VNA