Director of Arash Digital Participates in the Indonesia-Thailand Cross-border Payment Pre-Launching (17/08/2021)

Bank Indonesia launched a cross-border QR payment linkage in collaboration with Bank of Thailand on August 17, 2021 - Indonesia's 76th Independence Day. This pre-launching aims to accelerate national economic and financial progress in accordance with the Indonesian Payment System Blueprint (BPSI) 2025 in navigating the role of payment system industry in the digital era. This system will be able to interconnect QRIS payments from both countries.

The pre-launching starts with piloting phase, with the purpose to ensure interconnection and opportunity for customers, merchants, and operators for a full commercial rollout in 2022. At the full rollout stage, Indonesian users can utilize mobile payment apps to scan Thai QR Codes in the interest of creating payments with any merchants in Thailand (Outbound Cross-boder Payment) and vice versa (Inbound Cross-border Payment).

Currently, Arash Digital in joint with several BUKU 4 banks in Indonesia have implemented Cross-border Payment to handle transactions made by Chinese tourists in Indonesia using WeChat Pay or Alipay. This service has been officially running since 2020 after got approval from central bank and will be very beneficial for both countries. For Chinese tourists, transactions with Indonesian merchant made simpler. Meanwhile, Indonesia gains benefit from the tax of tourist transactions, as well as increased foreign exchange reserve. In the future, tourism sector will benefit greatly from this service because of the vast number of Chinese tourists who visit Indonesia.

Herlina Kalla, Director of Arash Digital, explained that when the government raise the gate on Indonesian tourism, Cross-border Payment will run significantly and ushering countless benefits. In line with decrease of the Covid pandemic level, Cross-border Payment will have prominent contribution to the country with Arash Digital as the initiator.

Chinese tourists are the first to be able to enjoy Cross-border Payments since WeChat Pay has obtained the license to operate from Bank Indonesia. Beside that, Chinese tourists has great potential to be contributed for increasing government income is recorded by BPS as the second largest foreign tourist during 2019, with 2.07 million tourists.

Source:

INDONESIA AND THAILAND LAUNCH CROSS-BORDER QR PAYMENT LINKAGE

Jumlah kunjungan wisman ke Indonesia Desember 2019 mencapai 1,38 juta kunjungan.