Making payments invisible is the next competitive edge for businesses

THE goal behind every tap, QR code scan or digital wallet payment is to let customers move their money safely, without encountering any friction. In other words, to make the complicated infrastructure – the tokenisation, local acquiring and fraud-checking processes – behind it disappear.

For years, that invisibility was regarded as a user experience perk. But the businesses leapfrogging others treated it as a strategic decision that shapes their costs, reach and risk directly.

Making payments disappear from the consumer’s view is expensive. But with the growing adoption of digital wallets, getting it wrong could be even more expensive – no matter the business’ size.

Global Payments’ 11th annual Global Payments Report found that use of digital wallets is extensive in the Asia-Pacific. In 2025, they accounted for 77 per cent of e-commerce value and 62 per cent of point-of-sale value, compared with 11 per cent and 13 per cent for credit cards, respectively.

Though the figures are weighted heavily by China and India, the world’s largest wallet markets, adoption is spreading across the region. For instance, in Hong Kong, digital wallets overtook cards for the first time this year.

Payment rails are converging. The rise of Hong Kong’s digital wallet usage is being followed by account-to-account payments, which ride the city’s Faster Payment System. Such payments are projected to reach 23 per cent of e-commerce value and 13 per cent of point-of-sale value by 2030.

Singapore is likewise running a parallel trajectory with its PayNow infrastructure. In-store payment app value is forecast to grow 135 per cent faster than the overall point-of-sale market by 2030.

Additionally, Project Nexus, an initiative by several regional central banks, is connecting Asean real-time payment systems, meaning a QR code scanned in one market settles a transaction as easily as one scanned at home.

For merchants across the region, that puts their competitive edge in a different place.

The number of payment network logos offered at checkout no longer matters as much as whether the systems a customer’s money moves through are resilient and invisible enough that a festival attendee, a gym member and someone sending money home never have to think about them.

Having to connect to a wider set of local payment rails – cards, wallets, QR codes, account-to-account systems – and make the channels between those rails disappear, without losing control of the risk underneath, is the shared payments infrastructure problem.

Convergence, not coincidence

Speaking at a recent Global Payments panel, Pete Gordon, chief product officer at Clockenflap, Hong Kong’s largest outdoor music and arts festival, described two real costs of fragmented payment systems.

Before fans arrive, ticket sales in a single currency shut out buyers who would rather pay in their own, resulting in a lost sale, not just friction.

Once on site, the festival runs entirely cashless, so a dropped connection mid-transaction becomes Clockenflap’s problem, not the fans’. A failed payment has to be rare and recoverable, or the festival loses the sale and the goodwill.

Danny Diab, managing director of Snap Fitness, a multi-market fitness franchise, said the company’s promise of global access with a single membership sits on a labyrinth of franchise owners, bank accounts and a payments infrastructure that moves a member’s encrypted card details between them in real time.

That is manageable within one country. It becomes harder when the company’s members travel across borders, since the business needs a payment method that its members trust and the ability to move credentials between countries in real time.

For Snap Fitness, getting this process right paid for itself: Accepting Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System alongside Alipay and WeChat Pay pulled transaction costs down from card fees of around 2.8 to 2.9 per cent. It also let a single-site gym reach mainland Chinese visitors that it could not serve before.

The bigger prize, though, is moving a member’s credentials across borders without requiring effort from them. Diab called that a “moat”: a competitive advantage for any multi-market business.

Trust must be built in

However, in solving for seamlessness, both businesses took on a new kind of risk. For Clockenflap, that is the money behind a dropped connection. For Snap Fitness, it is a credential that must stay secure while moving between systems.

Removing friction does not remove what can go wrong; it shifts the responsibility of catching these problems from the customer to the business. The smoother a payment looks, the more infrastructure must be working underneath to stop that risk from reaching the customer.

How much does that risk cost when not managed? Ken Zheng, CEO of Panda Remit, a digital remittance platform, said his customers want speed and low costs. But they also increasingly expect to know where every cent goes.

This transparency works only if instant settlement is backed by fraud checks running in real time. The remittance industry’s average fraud loss runs above 50 basis points (bps) of transaction value; Panda Remit’s was under 1 bps last year.

This gap is not an accident of scale. Instant settlement has removed a safety net the industry once had: A transfer previously took days to clear, which gave time to catch a scam before the money was paid out.

Now that settlements happen in seconds, that buffer is gone and replaced by real-time monitoring of every transaction instead of reliance on delay.

In payments, a frictionless process is the ultimate goal for a festival, a gym franchise and a remittance company. If their infrastructure can disappear completely and securely enough, users have no reason to ever notice it, and the company acquires one more customer.

The writer is executive lead, enterprise Apac, at Global Payments.

The commentary is based on the writer’s own experiences, observations and argument. AI tools were used to summarise a media roundtable transcript for the commentary. The writer remains fully accountable for the commentary’s accuracy, originality and final form.