Southeast Asia is an emerging market on many digital fronts, including digital payments. Along with the region’s booming digital commerce industry, the digital payments industry expects to grow multifold by 2025. The
Southeast Asian countries: Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, are the largest markets and anticipate the highest growth not only in Southeast Asia but in the Asia-Pacific region.
. Despite that, the digital payment adoption rate is high, and payment methods such as digital wallets and contactless payments are gaining significant popularity among consumers. Transaction values and volumes of mobile payments in Southeast Asia were projected to increase at much higher rates compared to the number of its users.
Digital commerce
The Southeast Asian
e-commerce market was forecast to grow significantly by 2025 in the emerging markets of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Accordingly, these four markets were forecast to see the highest growth in mobile users by 2025. Cards, domestic payments, cash, and mobile wallets were all payment methods contributing the most to the total e-commerce gross merchandise value (GMV) in Southeast Asia. Yet the e-commerce GMV of cash payments was forecast to stagnate compared to other payment methods. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is at a nascent stage in Southeast Asia, and the transaction value is comparatively miniscule. Hence, BNPL payments were projected to have the highest growth among digital payment methods in Southeast Asia. As for e-commerce enterprises,
PayPal was the most common digital payment platform used in the big 6 countries.
Consumer behavior
Payment preferences vary among Southeast Asian countries. Consumers in Thailand and Cambodia preferred cash payments the most, while Singaporeans preferred contactless cards. Even for digital commerce payments,
cash on delivery was still a preferred method for many in Vietnam and the Philippines.
Besides using digital payments for shopping, digital remittances are an important segment in Southeast Asia. The
average transaction value of digital remittances was higher than digital commerce payments and mobile point-of-sale (POS) payments. Moreover, according to a survey among digital banking consumers, the ability to send money to friends and family instantly was of high importance for more than half of the consumers in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand.
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