Every year, the conversation around Southeast Asia’s digital commerce boom tends to fixate on the same things: which marketplace is winning, which category is growing fastest, which super app has the most users. What receives far less attention is the infrastructure sitting quietly beneath all of it. Payments, specifically whether a merchant can accept the right method in the right format at the right moment, are fast becoming the defining variable in whether a business actually converts in this market.
That reality is what makes EBANX’s April 2026 expansion into Southeast Asia worth paying close attention to. The Brazilian payments firm, which specialises in cross-border payment services for emerging markets, announced it would begin operating in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Turkey, markets that together represent a USD 610 billion digital commerce opportunity and more than 386 million consumers. The move signals something broader than one company’s growth strategy. It confirms that the payments layer in Southeast Asia has become contested territory, and that building the right checkout infrastructure is now a prerequisite for growth rather than an afterthought.
We explore why Southeast Asia’s digital payments boom is about to reshape everyday life
The region that skipped the card era
To understand why payments are so complicated here, you have to understand how the region got to where it is. Southeast Asia did not follow the Western trajectory of cash giving way to cards, which then gave way to digital payments. For the most part, it skipped the middle step entirely, and that has left global merchants trying to enter the market with playbooks that simply do not apply.
The region largely bypassed card infrastructure, going from cash straight to e-wallets and account-to-account transfers. Combined, those two methods account for 65% of eCommerce in Thailand, 61% in Indonesia, 50% in the Philippines and 35% in Malaysia, according to data from Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence. This was not an accident of geography or income. It was the result of a generation of consumers who got smartphones before bank accounts, and for whom digital wallets and QR-based transfers solved a real and immediate problem
Vietnam illustrates the duality well. Cash still represents one-third of point-of-sale value there, with cash on delivery making up 16% of eCommerce spending, yet platforms like MoMo, VietQR and ZaloPay are simultaneously among the country’s most popular payment methods. A single market can be cash-heavy and wallet-native at the same time, depending on geography, age group or product category. That is the complexity a merchant has to navigate before a single transaction clears.
Through initiatives like the ASEAN Unified QR project, several countries, including Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, have linked their national payment systems, allowing users to pay abroad directly from their local banking or wallet apps without currency exchange or card fees. That interoperability is genuine progress, but it also illustrates how local each of these systems remains. They were built domestically, for domestic users, with cross-border compatibility as a secondary consideration.
What payment fragmentation does to conversion
For a global merchant trying to sell into this region, payment fragmentation is not merely inconvenient. It is a direct drag on revenue, and the numbers bear that out. The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report notes that 87% of users juggle multiple e-wallets, while traditional banks still hold a significant trust advantage. Consumers know which wallet they trust. If a merchant’s checkout does not offer it, the transaction often does not happen.
Bain and Google’s e-Conomy SEA 2025 report puts Southeast Asia’s digital economy at more than USD 300 billion in gross merchandise value, with eCommerce at USD 185 billion. That number represents potential, not guaranteed revenue. Merchants who have built their infrastructure around card-first checkout models are locked out of a meaningful share of it without ever quite knowing why their conversion rates look the way they do.
By 2028, digital payments are expected to account for 94% of total eCommerce payments in Southeast Asia, with the most significant growth in mobile wallets at 94.9% and domestic payment methods at 97.9%.
Where the startup opportunities actually sit
The fragmentation creates an underappreciated opportunity for fintech startups, and not just in payment processing. The real white space spans the entire stack around the transaction: checkout optimisation, payment orchestration, FX management, reconciliation, fraud controls and merchant settlement.
Payment orchestration is increasingly where the value sits. A merchant selling across Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam does not want three separate integrations, three compliance obligations and three reconciliation workflows. They want a single layer that handles the complexity underneath, and right now, no single global provider has fully solved that for this region.
International transactions already account for 30% of eCommerce volume in Thailand and Malaysia and 28% in the Philippines, volumes large enough that even incremental improvements in FX efficiency translate into meaningful margin recovery at scale. The mix of wallet-based payments, bank transfers and instalment products creates a risk surface that looks rather different from card-heavy markets, and startups building fraud models trained on local transaction patterns have a structural edge over those adapting Western ones.
The buy now pay later space follows the same logic. Providers like Kredivo, Akulaku and Atome are already deeply integrated with eCommerce platforms in ways that purely global players have not replicated, because the integrations required local relationships, local regulatory navigation and local consumer insight that takes time to build. The structural reasons why payments-adjacent businesses tend to be so ingrained across the region are explored in how fintech startups in SEA are reshaping financial inclusion, particularly around the role of trust and local specificity in driving adoption.
Why global players are moving now
EBANX’s Southeast Asia push is notable because the company has done this before. It built its business by solving the same problem in Latin America and Africa, markets that similarly bypassed card infrastructure and developed local payment rails that global merchants could not navigate on their own. Across its seven Asian markets, the company will have integrated more than 20 payment methods, including digital wallets, account-to-account transactions and QR-based payments alongside credit and debit cards. prnewswire
As global merchants look to diversify beyond established markets like the US, Europe, Brazil and Mexico, cross-border demand in Southeast Asian economies is already waiting for them. The market is not the constraint. The checkout infrastructure is. Three in five people in the region shop online and over 60% of all payments are digital. Consumer behaviour has already shifted. The merchant-side infrastructure to capture it fully has not caught up.
The checkout layer is where scale gets decided
Southeast Asia’s digital commerce market is mature enough now that competition is no longer primarily about product catalogue or delivery speed. Those are table stakes. The differentiation is shifting to what happens at the moment of payment, and specifically whether the experience is trusted, affordable and frictionless enough for the consumer to follow through.
A consumer who does not see their preferred wallet at checkout will be more likely to abandon their transaction. A merchant who cannot reconcile payments across five currencies and six markets will lose margin slowly and silently. A platform that cannot route transactions intelligently during peak load will lose conversions it never even registers as lost.
The World Economic Forum projects the region will surpass USD 1 trillion in digital transactions, marking one of the fastest payment transformations globally. That volume has to flow through somewhere. The startups and infrastructure providers that own the checkout layer, not just the front-end experience but the routing, settlement, compliance and reconciliation underneath, are quietly building some of the most durable positions in Southeast Asian commerce.
The next wave of fintech opportunity in this region will not look like another super app or another marketplace. It will look like invisible infrastructure: the layer that makes a sale possible when everything else is already in place.