Vietnam aims to welcome 25 million international visitors in 2026. In the first four months of the year, the whole country welcomed nearly 8.8 million visitors, completing 35% of the plan.
That growth poses a practical requirement: how to make that flow of customers spend easily at all points of contact, from small shops outside the center to shopping baskets on an e-commerce website. These challenges have been solved through new solutions, in coordination with Payoo, NAPAS and Visa.
At some booths, cross-border transactions have been carried out in front of a large number of visitors. Accordingly, users open the Alipay application, scan VietQRGlobal code on POS devices and complete the milk tea purchase in just a few seconds, without exchanging cash, without installing additional applications.
Previously, card payment was the default option for international tourists coming to Vietnam on the condition that stores had to invest in POS machines. According to the State Bank, the whole country currently has more than 864,000 POS devices, this number is still small compared to the scale of retail tourism and services. Equipment costs and MDR fees (card payment discount fees) are barriers that prevent many small businesses outside the city from ever accessing international payment infrastructure.
VietQRGlobal changes that approach with a model that almost has no entry fees. A sticker or mini standee printed with a QR code placed at the counter is enough to turn a small sales point into an international payment acceptance point, the activation process is completed on the same day.
Benefits are spread across both sides. On the tourist side, especially tourists from China, Korea and Southeast Asian countries, transactions in Vietnam are no different from buying goods at home: they use the domestic banking application or e-wallet, transactions are displayed in domestic currency on personal devices, with biometric authentication or Smart OTP.
On the business side, the entire exchange rate control and conversion process is automated; stores receive VND money transferred directly to accounts at transparent exchange rates, without having to manually process foreign currencies, significantly reducing cash processing operations at points of sale.
According to shares from a solution development representative, VietQRGlobal is complementary, not replacing international cards. Tourists are increasingly looking to remote areas, villages, eco-tourism areas, areas where traditional POSs are less feasible and less cost-effective. The implementation of VietQRGlobal can help small businesses and stores in areas far from the center also welcome international visitors conveniently.
This direction has similarities with the initial stage of VietQR in the domestic market. When smartphones became inseparable objects, QR payments gradually became a natural habit. There is a basis to expect cross-border QRs to spread similarly, especially with groups of customers from China, Korea and Southeast Asian countries, markets that are already familiar with QR payments and account for a large proportion of the number of customers coming to Vietnam.
If VietQRGlobal solves the problem at the counter, in the digital environment, the online shopping process requires re-entering card information each transaction, making it easy to make mistakes and increasing the rate of abandoning the shopping cart. To solve that problem, the units have developed Click to Pay, a solution to eliminate manual card entry by biometric authentication, thereby shortening the online payment process, and at the same time contributing to improving the rate of accepted transactions, a factor directly affecting the seller's revenue.
