QRIS — QR Code standard

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 ^{Indonesia report}.

Indonesia introduced QRIS Tap (NFC variant) in March 2025, adding tap-to-pay capability alongside the QR scanning ^{Indonesia report}.

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) ^{Indonesia report}.

Launch dates ^{1, 3}:

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 ^{Indonesia report}.
August 2025 — Japan becomes first non-ASEAN country with QRIS cross-border live ^{Indonesia report}.

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 ^{Indonesia report}:

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 ^{Indonesia report}.

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 ^{Indonesia report}.
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 ^{Indonesia report}.

Adoption rate (Q1 2024 → Q1 2025) ^{Indonesia report}:

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 ^{Indonesia report}:

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 ^{Indonesia report, Singapore report, Malaysia report, Thailand report}.

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, Indonesia report}.

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 ^{India report, Indonesia report}.

Fun facts

QRIS's transaction volume grew by 226 %+ in 2024 ^{Indonesia report} — 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, Indonesia report}. 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 ^{Indonesia report}. 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) ^{Indonesia report}
2.6 B quarterly transactions (Q1 2025) ^{Indonesia report}
226 % YoY 2024 transaction growth ^{Indonesia report}

QRIS Tap (NFC variant) live since March 2025, with iOS support planned ^{Indonesia report}. Cross-border footprint:

Active: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan (Aug 2025) ^{Indonesia report}
MoU / pilot: South Korea (Aug 2024), UAE (Aug 2024), China (2025 target) ^{Indonesia report}

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 ^{Indonesia report}.

Sources

Deployments

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