VNPAY-QR

Overview

VNPAY-QR is a Vietnamese merchant QR payment scheme operated by VNPAY (Vietnam Payment Solutions JSC, founded March 2007, now part of the VNLIFE group) ^{2, 16}. It is built on the EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) format and is consumed by scanning a merchant QR with a bank's mobile-banking app or an e-wallet ^{3, 9}. VNPAY-QR is accepted into the scanning function of 33 mobile-banking apps, the VNPAY wallet, and 8 other e-wallets, and by August 2023 the merchant network had grown to over 750,000 acceptance points, including wet markets, pharmacies and local eateries ^{4, 5}.

VNPAY-QR is distinct from VietQR (the NAPAS interbank QR): VietQR encodes a bank account behind the NAPAS rail, whereas VNPAY-QR is a payment-gateway / acquiring QR routed through VNPAY's merchant network ^{4, 6}. In the EMVCo MPM payload, the two are told apart by their merchant-account-information template: VNPAY-QR uses tag 26 carrying the GUID A000000775, while VietQR/NAPAS uses tag 38 with GUID A000000727.

History

March 2007 — VNPAY founded. Vietnam Payment Solutions JSC (VNPAY) was set up by Trần Trí Mạnh together with co-founders Trần Văn Ký and Lê Tánh, as one of the first companies licensed to pilot electronic-wallet payment services in Vietnam ^{16, 18}. The company grew into a payment gateway connecting businesses with banks for card, QR-code, installment and app-to-app payments; VNPAY-QR today reports about 22 million users ¹⁶.

~2017 — first QR-into-bank-app integration. VNPAY became the first payment gateway to integrate QR code payment into mobile banking applications in Vietnam, a status formally recognised in August 2018 by the Vietnam Record Organisation (Vietkings) ¹⁹. This is the technical milestone that defines VNPAY-QR's identity: bank apps scanning a third-party merchant QR rather than VNPAY having to ship its own wallet.

2018 — VNLIFE holding established to own VNPAY and build a broader ecosystem (payments, travel, logistics, commerce); Niraan De Silva serves as CEO of VNLIFE ¹⁶.

July 2019 — SoftBank Vision Fund + GIC invest US$300 M combined (~US$200 M from SoftBank, US$100 M from GIC) — at the time one of the largest Vietnamese tech investments to date ¹⁸.

December 2020 — VNPAY becomes Vietnam's second tech unicorn after VNG, at a valuation above US$1 billion, and one of 12 SE-Asian unicorns named that year ^{16, 18}.

16 September 2021 — Series B of >US$250 M co-led by General Atlantic and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from PayPal Ventures, EDBI, plus existing investors GIC and SoftBank Vision Fund 1 — pushing VNLIFE's valuation above US$1 B ¹⁸.

August 2023 — 750,000+ merchants. VNPAY reported that its QR-code network had expanded to over 750,000 merchants nationwide, reaching into wet markets, pharmacies and small eateries ⁵.

Bank and partner reach — VNPAY provides electronic-payment services to more than 40 banks, 5 telecom operators and a large base of e-commerce and SME merchants ^{2, 4}.

2024 — VNPAY at scale. Revenue ~US$128.3 M, headcount ~855 people ¹⁵.

International acquiring partnerships:

UnionPay × VNPAY × ECPay (28 December 2021) — a partnership enabling UnionPay QR-code acceptance across the VNPAY and ECPay merchant networks, adding ~15,000 merchants for a ~45,000-merchant total; VNPAY contributed 17 top merchants across 1,200+ stores. VNPAY is described in the announcement as "one of the biggest QR-code-for-payment merchant acquirers in Vietnam" ⁷.
Visa × VNPAY (2024) — a strategic partnership to advance digital and contactless payments, including VNPAY SoftPOS (PCI-CPoC v1.0 certified, EMVCo Level 2) — bringing SoftPOS to Vietnamese SMBs ^{1, 8}.
Cross-border QR — Thailand's bank cross-border QR documentation lists Vietnam (VNPAY) among the inbound QR schemes Thai apps can scan, alongside Singapore (PayNow), Indonesia (QRIS), Malaysia (DuitNow), Cambodia (KHQR) and Laos ¹⁰.

Technical specification

VNPAY-QR is an EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) payload — the same plain-text TLV (Tag-Length-Value) string family used by VietQR, QRIS, PromptPay QR and the broader EMVCo MPM standard ^{3, 9}.

EMVCo MPM foundation ^{3, 9}:

Payload format indicator: tag 00 = 01.
Point-of-initiation: tag 01 (11 static, 12 dynamic).
Transaction currency: tag 53 = 704 (VND).
Country code: tag 58 = VN.
Merchant name and city: tags 59 / 60.
Integrity: a CRC-16/CCITT-FALSE checksum in tag 63, computed over the whole payload up to and including the 6304 header.
Underlying symbology: QR Code.

Merchant-account-information template ^{3, 9}:

EMVCo reserves tags 26–51 for non-EMVCo payment operators; within each, sub-tag 00 carries a globally unique identifier (GUID) that names the scheme.
VNPAY-QR's template is tag 26 with GUID A000000775 in sub-tag 00, confirmed in the open-source vietnam-qr-pay library, whose VNPayQR example payload begins ...01021126280010A000000775... ⁹.
Beneath the template, VNPAY uses an additional-data structure with sub-field IDs including 01 BillNumber, 02 CustomerMobileNumber, 03 StoreLabel, 05 ReferenceLabel, 06 CustomerLabel, 07 TerminalLabel, 08 PurposeOfTransaction ^{9, 17}.
This template is the key field that distinguishes VNPAY-QR from VietQR/NAPAS, which lives in tag 38 under GUID A000000727 ⁹.

Worked example fields decoded from a real VNPAY-QR payload by the vietnam-qr-pay library: provider VNPAY, merchant ID 0105313144, amount 21090000, store CPSHN ONLINE, terminal ONLHN, purpose CellphoneS ^{9, 17}.

Modes ^{3, 9}:

Merchant-presented (static) — a printed VNPAY QR at the merchant; the payer enters the amount.
Merchant-presented (dynamic) — POS/gateway generates a per-transaction QR carrying the amount in tag 54.

Use cases

In-store retail acceptance — VNPAY-QR stickers and POS QRs across a very broad merchant base (750,000+ points by 2023), including informal retail such as wet markets and pharmacies ⁵.
Bank-app scanning — the QR is scanned from inside 33 banks' mobile apps; e.g. VietinBank iPay Mobile lets cardholders pay VNPAY acceptance points by QR, even funding from a credit card ¹².
E-wallet payments — the VNPAY wallet plus 8 other e-wallets can scan VNPAY-QR ⁴.
E-commerce / online checkout — VNPAY operates as a payment gateway for 200+ e-commerce enterprises, with VNPAY-QR offered as an online checkout method (including on Shopify via VNPAY) ^{2, 13}.
Inbound cross-border tourism — UnionPay QR acceptance across the VNPAY network lets Chinese UnionPay users pay, and Thailand lists Vietnam/VNPAY among scannable inbound QR schemes for travellers ^{7, 10}.

Implementations

VNPAY-QR is handled by the same open-source Vietnamese QR libraries that cover VietQR, since both are EMVCo MPM payloads distinguished only by their merchant-account-information template:

TypeScript — xuannghia/vietnam-qr-pay — encode/decode for VietQR (bank QR, Momo/ZaloPay universal QR) and VNPayQR; exposes provider name, merchant ID, amount, store, terminal, purpose and reference fields. ~160 stars, latest release v1.5.0 (May 2025) ⁹.
TypeScript — hunghg255/vn-qr-pay — encode/decode for VietQR and VNPayQR (encodeVnPay); ~13 stars ¹¹.
Go — tranvu711/qrpayment — Go QR-payment library with a QRCode struct covering VNPAY data: merchant details, terminal, amount and additional consumer data ¹⁴.

General EMVCo MPM parsers also read VNPAY-QR payloads once the tag-26 GUID is recognised.

Acquiring / gateway integrations: VNPAY-QR is exposed as a payment method by third-party PSPs and aggregators (e.g. the IXOPAY VNPAY-QR adapter) and by VNPAY's own merchant SDKs ⁶.

Comparison

vs. VietQR (NAPAS, Vietnam) — Same EMVCo MPM symbology, different role and different template. VietQR is the state-sanctioned national interbank QR under NAPAS/SBV (tag 38, GUID A000000727), encoding a bank account for account-to-account credit transfer over NAPAS 247. VNPAY-QR is a private merchant-acquiring QR under VNPAY/VNLIFE (tag 26, GUID A000000775), routed through VNPAY's gateway and merchant network. A payer's bank app can typically scan both; the template GUID tells the app which rail to use ^{4, 6, 9}.

vs. QRIS (Indonesia) / PromptPay QR (Thailand) — All three are EMVCo MPM national/scheme QRs. QRIS and PromptPay are central-bank-mandated single national standards; Vietnam instead runs a two-track landscape — NAPAS VietQR plus private gateways like VNPAY-QR — which is why two distinct merchant templates coexist in the same EMVCo payload space ^{9, 10}.

vs. EMVCo MPM (the base spec) — VNPAY-QR is a concrete profile of EMVCo MPM: it inherits the TLV envelope, the CRC-16 in tag 63, currency 704 and country VN, and adds only its tag-26/A000000775 merchant template ^{3, 9}.

Fun facts

Two national QR schemes sharing one EMVCo payload format. VNPAY-QR is one of the clearest live examples — VietQR and VNPAY-QR can sit on the same screen, scanned by the same app, distinguished only by whether the merchant data is in tag 38 (A000000727, NAPAS) or tag 26 (A000000775, VNPAY) ⁹. Two competing rails coexisting in one TLV container is uncommon at the national level.

The pioneer milestone is regulator-blessed. VNPAY's status as "first payment gateway to integrate QR code payment into mobile banking applications" in Vietnam was certified by Vietkings (Vietnam Record Organisation) in August 2018 — a Guinness-record-style civic certification of a payments first that few other countries' QR pioneers have on the books ¹⁹.

Two unicorns, two Vietnamese QR worlds. Vietnam's national QR landscape is shaped by its only two tech unicorns: VNG (parent of ZaloPay QR, named unicorn 2014) and VNLIFE/VNPAY (named unicorn December 2020, valuation past US$1 B after the 2021 Series B) — same Series B even shares an investor in GIC and PayPal's strategic arm ^{16, 18}.

PayPal Ventures backs a competing payment rail. VNPAY's 2021 Series B was the first PayPal Ventures investment in a Vietnamese fintech — a striking inversion where the global wallet leader directly funds a foreign national-QR network rather than competing with it ¹⁸.

Bottom-up acceptance strategy. VNPAY grew the QR network into informal retail — wet markets and pharmacies among 750,000+ merchants by 2023 — rather than starting from large chains, a bottom-up acceptance strategy that mirrors the deep small-vendor penetration seen with Pix in Brazil and DuitNow in Malaysia ⁵.

Status

Active. VNPAY-QR is one of the two dominant merchant QR rails in Vietnam (alongside NAPAS VietQR), with a 750,000+ merchant network as of 2023 and continuing expansion through bank, telecom and international-scheme partnerships (UnionPay, Visa) ^{1, 5, 7, 8}. VNPAY reported revenue of about USD 128.3 M in 2024 ¹⁵. No deprecation is indicated; the scheme is being extended into SoftPOS and cross-border acceptance ^{1, 10}.

Sources

Deployments

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

VN — VN-vietnam.md

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.