25 SEP 2026 — Bank Indonesia and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority signed a memorandum on cross-border QR payments on 24 September. The English-language accounts describe an agreement to hold talks; the Indonesian ones describe what the talks are for.
The aim is to settle transactions in rupiah and Hong Kong dollars without first converting through the United States dollar.
What was signed
The memorandum commits the two authorities to discuss technical, operational and regulatory matters and to explore a cross-jurisdiction QR payment arrangement. It was signed by Bank Indonesia's governor and the Hong Kong authority's chief executive.
The Hong Kong report is careful and thin: faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive payments, with no timetable, no pilot, and no launch date. It names neither Indonesia's QRIS system nor Hong Kong's Faster Payment System, and it does not mention currency at all.
The part only in Indonesian
Bisnis.com reports that the arrangement rests on Local Currency Transaction principles: bilateral settlement in each country's own currency, without prior conversion into United States dollars. Ramdan Denny Prakoso, executive director of Bank Indonesia's communications department, is quoted on the aim of faster, cheaper and more inclusive payments between the two places.
The stated benefits follow from the mechanism, since fewer conversions mean lower costs and less exposure to exchange-rate movement.
The same signing was framed differently for different audiences. That is not a contradiction; it is a difference in what each audience is told the agreement is about.
How big QRIS already is
Indonesia is not negotiating from a standing start. As reported in August from figures given by deputy governor Filianingsih Hendarta, QRIS handled 12.55 billion transactions in the first half of 2026, twice the year-earlier count, worth 600.69 trillion rupiah, an increase of 89.52 per cent.
The system had around 66 million users and 44.86 million merchants at the end of June, against year-end targets of 70 million users, 47 million merchants and 17 billion transactions.
Those are August figures for a January-to-June period, not current ones, and they describe domestic usage rather than cross-border flow.
What is not agreed
Nothing operational has been agreed. There is no launch date, no pilot, no technical specification and no commitment that the two systems will connect at all. The memorandum is an agreement to examine whether they can.
Indonesia has done this before and shipped: a link with China went live at the end of April. The precedent exists; the timetable for this one does not.
Two QR plays, one week
The timing is what makes the two announcements worth reading together. This week a Chinese card network said its QR footprint now covers more than 38 million merchants across all ten ASEAN states. That is a commercial network expanding outward from China.
This is the other model: two central banks connect national systems they already run and settle in their own currencies. One reaches merchants through a card scheme; the other reaches them through the domestic rails a regulator controls.
Both were announced inside a week. They are not the same proposition.
