Cash is disappearing from daily life across Southeast Asia. In 2019, nearly half of all transactions in Asia were made in cash. By 2027, that figure is expected to fall to just 14 percent, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Mobile wallets—once a convenience—are now overtaking physical currency as the region’s default mode of payment.
This isn’t just a shift in how people pay. It’s a full-blown rewrite of Southeast Asia’s consumer economy. From Bangkok to Manila, behaviour, access, and mobility are being shaped by QR codes, app-driven incentives, and an ecosystem of competing fintech platforms racing to own the checkout moment.
The scale of adoption is staggering. In the Philippines, over 90 million people—around 80 percent of the population—use GCash or Maya, according to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. In Indonesia, QRIS transactions surged to 2.7 billion in 2024, up 66 percent from the year prior, based on data from Bank Indonesia.
Thailand logged more than 16 billion PromptPay transactions in 2023, cementing it as the country’s most common payment method. In Singapore, the SGQR system now supports over 30 digital payment schemes, allowing users to scan a single code and choose their preferred app—no cash, no card, no friction.
Unlike China and India, where single players dominate, Southeast Asia is shaping a multi-platform economy. Consumers aren’t just going digital; they’re actively choosing between wallets based on rewards, speed, and the ecosystem of services attached to each app.
The Regional Play
A landmark pact between five ASEAN countries is turning mobile payments into a regional system. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines have linked their QR code schemes, enabling cross-border wallet use. A Filipino tourist in Bangkok can pay with GCash. A Thai traveller in Singapore can use PromptPay. No currency exchange. No new app. Just scan and go.
This isn’t just symbolic cooperation. It’s a practical leap toward regional commerce at digital speed. Consumers already expect to scan and pay anywhere. Now, the infrastructure is catching up.
More than 100 million tourists visited ASEAN countries in 2024. Many of them already live cashless at home—and now expect the same abroad. For small businesses, cross-border payments mean a wider market without new infrastructure. A QR sticker and a smartphone are all it takes.
Policymakers see this as just the beginning. Cross-border wallet use could soon expand to remittances, regional e-commerce, and subscription billing. Southeast Asia is quietly building the infrastructure to support a truly interoperable digital economy.
Platform Power and Wallet Wars
Beneath all this infrastructure is a more urgent contest—one for daily dominance. Wallets are no longer just payment tools. They are retail ecosystems, vying for attention, behaviour, and loyalty.
In Indonesia, ShopeePay, OVO, and Dana are locked in a three-way race, each tying payments to e-commerce, food delivery, and retail perks. In the Philippines, GCash leads with over 90 million users, while Maya carves out a younger audience through crypto, banking, and cashback. GrabPay holds ground in Singapore and Malaysia by weaving payments into transport and everyday services.
These wallets don’t just process payments. They offer credit, savings, loyalty points, insurance, and instant promotions. Consumers now choose where to shop based on who gives the better deal—not who’s closest or cheapest.
Brands are adapting fast. Retailers are building in-wallet offers and flash deals to stay top of mind. Banks are co-branding products to remain visible inside apps. In this economy, platform presence can matter more than price point.
Wallet ecosystems aren’t just changing how people pay—they’re changing how people choose. As competition heats up, the most powerful wallets are becoming retail platforms in their own right, collapsing the gap between promotion and purchase.
How Brands Are Winning in the Wallet Economy
Jollibee x GCash: Scaling Speed and Spend with QR Exclusives
Jollibee has turned mobile wallets into more than just payment tools. In early 2024, the Filipino fast-food giant piloted QR-only express counters in busy Metro Manila stores—accepting GCash exclusively for walk-up orders.
The results were immediate. Checkout times fell by 30 percent on average, with lunchtime throughput increasing by nearly 20 percent in the busiest branches. But the real advantage was behavioural. GCash-linked promotions—including “buy one, get one” bundles for specific meal sets—drove higher ticket sizes and repeat visits. Jollibee reported a 12 percent lift in average order value among wallet users compared to traditional cash or card buyers during the campaign window.
Beyond volume, the partnership gave Jollibee something more valuable: clear usage patterns. It tracked conversion by time of day, adjusted promotions instantly, and mapped how wallet users shop differently. The model offers lessons beyond fast food. QSR chains across the region are now experimenting with QR-linked incentives to boost order volume and loyalty.
Unilever Vietnam x ZaloPay: Closing the Loop on Sampling and Segmentation
Unilever Vietnam used mobile wallets for more than sales—it used them to test, learn, and refine. In a 2024 pilot with ZaloPay, the brand launched a digital sampling campaign for its new “urban essentials” personal care line targeting Gen Z professionals.
Consumers claimed samples directly through the ZaloPay app, but redemption came with a short quiz and opt-in to Unilever’s official account. In just three weeks, over 150,000 users participated. Of those, 17 percent converted to purchase. More importantly, the campaign delivered real data: which products got tried, how long users waited, and who came back to buy.
Traditional sampling often delivers little feedback and a lot of waste. This campaign flipped the script. For FMCG brands, it’s a path forward—less sampling waste, more segment-level insight, and faster market-readiness. It wasn’t just about targeting—it was about validating what a new segment actually wanted.
Wallets as Retail Real Estate
In Southeast Asia’s evolving consumer economy, mobile wallets are becoming the new shelf. They are visible, contextual, and central to purchase decisions. No longer just the endpoint, they’re shaping what happens before the sale is even made.
Wallets are now where discovery happens. Real-time promos, loyalty rewards, and flash deals make QR apps as influential as in-store signage. In Indonesia, ShopeePay’s “Deals Near Me” surfaces location-based offers that nudge shoppers toward one convenience store—or one coffee shop—over another.
UX Design is now strategy. What shows up on the payment screen—bundled meals, upsells, time-limited offers—can shift behaviour in seconds. In a recent survey, 62 percent of Southeast Asian wallet users said an in-app offer had changed their purchase decision in the past three months.
Brands are responding with wallet-native campaigns. In the Philippines, GCash partners with major retailers to launch app-exclusive bundles. In Vietnam, FMCG players are testing ZaloPay-only SKUs to gauge price sensitivity among mobile-first Gen Z consumers.
For marketers, this changes the playbook. Campaigns now live inside the moment—built into the wallet, not broadcast through media. And just like endcaps in a store, wallet placement is scarce, valuable, and judged by performance.
How Digital Wallets Are Closing the Financial Gap
While wallets compete for urban customers, they also unlock access for millions previously excluded from formal finance. The World Bank estimates that over 40 percent of adults in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam remain unbanked. Mobile wallets are changing that.
Street vendors, farmers, and gig workers are now building financial histories with every tap. In Indonesia, over 29 million small businesses use QRIS to accept payments. In the Philippines, GCash delivers welfare payouts, subsidies, and remittances, often to people who’ve never walked into a bank.
This shift is producing an entirely new class of consumers. They’re connected but overlooked—digitally fluent but invisible to most traditional marketing models. For researchers, the challenge now is to understand how financial access rewires habits and reshapes trust.
Wallet adoption may be booming across the region, but no two markets look alike. Some are dominated by one or two players. Others support overlapping apps, bank wallets, and homegrown fintechs. The variation speaks to different consumer needs and regulatory choices.
Comparing Wallet Ecosystems Across ASEAN
| Country | Dominant Wallets | Notable Features | Estimated Adoption |
| Indonesia | Dana, OVO, ShopeePay | QRIS compliance, local cashback, offline ubiquity | 70–75% |
| Philippines | GCash, Maya | Microloans, utility payments, crypto access | 80–85% |
| Thailand | PromptPay, TrueMoney | Linked to national ID and digital welfare payouts | 90%+ |
| Singapore | GrabPay, PayNow, DBS PayLah | High QR interoperability, cross-border ready | 95%+ |
| Malaysia | Touch ‘n Go, Boost | Toll road integration, state-backed incentives | 80%+ |
Sources: Central bank data, World Bank Global Findex (2024), platform reporting
What This Signals
The wallet boom in Southeast Asia is not a trend—it’s a system reset. It’s changing how value flows, how behaviour is tracked, and who gets included.
Consumers are gaining fast access to finance, but only through platforms that decide the terms. Governments see more. Banks lose ground. Retailers shift strategy. But the risks are real—ecosystem lock-in, data monopolies, and a widening gap for the disconnected.
Southeast Asia is building the prototype for a fully digital consumer economy. What works here won’t stay here. Markets with similar demographics will follow—some already are.
As wallets become embedded in daily life, they generate a stream of behavioural data that most traditional research methods cannot easily replicate. For brands and researchers alike, this shift is not just an operational upgrade—it is a structural advantage.
Who Gets Left Behind in a Wallet-Led Economy
Not everyone is tapping phones or using QR codes. Across Southeast Asia, millions still rely on cash, not by choice, but by necessity. As digital systems race ahead, they are leaving some consumers behind.
The elderly, rural communities, and informal workers without smartphones or stable internet still make up a large share of the population in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. For many, wallets remain either out of reach or out of trust.
Even in cities, resistance is growing. Consumers worry about data tracking, fraud, and hidden fees. In Thailand, a watchdog recently warned about wallet-based lenders targeting young users with high-interest loans disguised as pay-later perks.
Cash still offers something digital doesn’t—trust. In many traditional communities, handing over bills is easier, more familiar, and more accepted. As merchants go digital, cash users risk being pushed out of the transaction altogether.
Governments face a balancing act: modernise finance without deepening exclusion. Incentives for wallet use should not come at the cost of cash access, especially in rural or unbanked areas. For brands, the solution lies in hybrid systems that serve both digital adopters and cash loyalists.
The danger of a wallet-led economy is not that it moves too fast, but that it forgets who isn’t coming along. Progress will be measured not just in QR checkouts, but in how well the new economy includes the voices, habits, and limitations of every consumer.
A View from the Future Consumer
Southeast Asia is not just adopting digital finance—it’s rewriting the rules. While Europe debates regulation and the U.S. sticks to cards, this region is designing a payment system that is mobile, fast, and increasingly borderless. Consumers aren’t waiting for banks to evolve. They’re building the next model themselves.
For brands, the implications are clear. The old playbook—national campaigns, static rewards, and linear funnels—no longer works. Today’s consumers jump across apps, currencies, and contexts without hesitation. The winners will meet them there, designing not for convenience, but for relevance at the point of payment. Pricing isn’t set in advance. It’s surfaced in the moment—shaped by wallet prompts, bundled rewards, or time-limited offers.
For researchers, this landscape offers something rare: behaviour in real time. Every wallet tap leaves a trackable decision—what was bought, where, when, and how the user was nudged. But knowing what happened is not the same as knowing why. That’s where research matters most. Ethnography, cultural fluency, and journey mapping are the tools that explain what dashboards alone can’t.
Research must move faster, go deeper, and sit closer to where decisions are made—in wallet ecosystems, in platform partnerships, and in the fast-evolving lives of Southeast Asian consumers.
Some brands are already blending behaviour data with on-the-ground insight. In Vietnam, a beverage company spotted rural sales spikes through wallet data. Field interviews revealed the link: payday loans disbursed on the same day each month. That single insight reshaped everything—from promo timing to pack size.
The next breakthroughs in understanding consumers won’t come from dashboards alone. They’ll come from pairing live data with lived experience—decoding what people do and why they do it. The future of research isn’t digital by default. It’s embedded, agile, and built inside the systems where decisions happen.
Consumer power is shifting from income to intuition—from how much people spend to how fluently they move through the ecosystems around them. Southeast Asia isn’t adapting. It’s leading.
Kadence International helps brands decode evolving consumer behaviour across Asia and beyond. To understand what drives tomorrow’s decisions, talk to our team.
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