HitPay has launched Borderless QR, a new solution designed to simplify cross-border payments for merchants serving Asia’s fast-growing tourist economy.
The rollout comes as regional tourism spending is projected to hit USD 39.52 billion in 2026, creating fresh opportunities—and new friction points—at the checkout counter for micro, small, and medium enterprises.
The launch follows a milestone year for HitPay. In 2025, the platform recorded a doubling of year-on-year transaction volume and helped merchants save more than USD 10 million in costs, fueled by a 124-fold surge in non-card payments since 2020.
With MSMEs accounting for 97 percent of all businesses in Southeast Asia, HitPay is positioning Borderless QR as a practical tool to help even the smallest retailers tap into international demand without navigating a maze of incompatible payment standards.
For many retail and food and beverage operators, accepting payments from overseas visitors has meant juggling multiple QR systems, wallets, and reconciliation processes. Borderless QR collapses that complexity into a single, intuitive flow. Using the HitPay app, a merchant simply enters the transaction amount and selects the customer’s home country.
A dynamic QR code is instantly generated, allowing tourists to pay through their preferred domestic wallet at mid-market exchange rates with zero additional fees. Merchants, meanwhile, receive next-day settlement in their local currency.
Beyond convenience, the solution acts as a ground-level enabler of the ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, which seeks to link national payment systems across the region. While central banks lay the interoperability framework, HitPay provides the retail-facing layer that allows MSMEs to actually use it.
Through Borderless QR, merchants can now accept payments from widely used regional systems such as QR Ph of the Philippines, PayNow of Singapore, QRIS of Indonesia, PromptPay of Thailand, and VietQR of Vietnam, alongside international platforms including China’s WeChat Pay and India’s UPI.
“As Southeast Asia advances its collective digital payment goals, our focus is on making that connectivity practical for small businesses,” said Aditya Haripurkar, co-founder and chief executive officer of HitPay. He noted that Borderless QR enables merchants to generate a country-specific QR code with real-time currency conversion, ensuring visitors can pay using wallets they trust while businesses continue to settle in their own currency.
As tourism rebounds across the region, the bottleneck for cross-border commerce has shifted from travel access to point-of-sale execution. HitPay is aiming to remove that final barrier. By consolidating fragmented payment standards into a single checkout experience, Borderless QR reduces the time merchants spend on staff training, manual reconciliation, and error-prone processes.
Travelers benefit from full transparency, seeing exact prices in their home currency with no surprise fees, while merchants gain certainty by eliminating exposure to exchange rate volatility.
The initial rollout is focused on Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, with the platform built for rapid expansion across other HitPay markets. Activation requires only a software update, avoiding the costly infrastructure changes typical of traditional payment integrations. Early adopters in lifestyle retail, including regional brand The Paper Bunny, are already using Borderless QR to serve a growing base of international shoppers.
“HitPay Borderless QR has allowed us to offer a ‘shop like a local’ experience to every tourist who walks into our stores,” said Afifah of The Paper Bunny. She added that real-time currency conversion through a simple checkout flow has made international payments feel no different from domestic ones, freeing staff to focus on customer service rather than payment logistics.
With Borderless QR, HitPay is betting that the future of Asian commerce will be decided not just by connectivity between systems, but by how seamlessly that connectivity reaches the smallest storefronts across the region.
