QRIS, the Indonesian payment standard using QR codes, is rapidly gaining popularity at home and abroad. While the country celebrates its growing influence in the digital payment space, the United States has raised concerns, seeing the system as a potential trade barrier. This contrast between domestic progress and international scrutiny is now putting Indonesia’s financial diplomacy under the spotlight.
Bank Indonesia’s Senior Deputy Governor Destry Damayanti revealed that Indonesia is in talks with four new countries—South Korea, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—to enable QRIS-based transactions across borders.
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“In the process with Korea, India, the United Arab Emirates, also in progress with Saudi Arabia,” Destry announced during a public event celebrating Kartini Day for Indonesian migrant workers at the Dhanapala Building in Jakarta on Monday, April 21, 2025.
This would expand QRIS’s reach beyond its current international presence. Destry confirmed that QRIS is already operational in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. Indonesian citizens traveling to those countries can now pay directly from their phones using QRIS, bypassing the need for cash.
“It makes things easier. So later if our friends (Indonesian migrant workers), for example, want to make a transaction, they can use QRIS—either with a bank-based or a non-bank-based provider, and there are many non-bank QRIS providers,” she explained.
But not everyone is pleased with this progress. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized Indonesia’s payment ecosystem, particularly the QRIS system, in a report titled Foreign Trade Barriers, published by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in late February 2025.
The report takes issue with Bank Indonesia Regulation No. 21/2019, which established QRIS as a national standard for all QR code payments in Indonesia. According to the U.S., this regulation may disadvantage foreign companies.
“U.S. companies, including payment providers and banks, have expressed concern that during the formulation of Bank Indonesia’s QR Code policy, international stakeholders were neither informed about the nature of the proposed changes nor given the opportunity to share their perspectives on how the system could be designed to interact more smoothly with existing payment infrastructures,” the USTR document stated.
The criticism didn’t stop there. The U.S. government also highlighted Bank Indonesia Regulation No. 19/08/2017 regarding the National Payment Gateway (GPN), which mandates that all domestic debit and credit transactions must be processed through local switching institutions licensed by Bank Indonesia.
Despite these criticisms, Indonesia remains focused on expanding its payment infrastructure through QRIS. The system not only enhances convenience for travelers and migrant workers but also strengthens Indonesia’s financial footprint in the global economy.
As QRIS continues to grow in both use and geographic reach, the challenge for Indonesia will be to balance national interest and regulatory control with openness to international cooperation—especially in an increasingly interconnected financial world.
