How QRIS Works – Complete Guide to Indonesia's QR Payment

QRIS — Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard — is Indonesia's national QR payment standard, developed by Bank Indonesia (BI) together with the Indonesian Payment System Association (ASPI). Officially launched on August 17, 2019 (Indonesia's Independence Day) and made mandatory for all payment providers on January 1, 2020, QRIS is built on the international EMV Merchant Presented Mode (MPM) specification — the same technical foundation used by PromptPay in Thailand and PayNow in Singapore. Before QRIS, Indonesian merchants had to display multiple QR code stickers at their counters — one for each payment app. A GoPay user couldn't scan an OVO QR code, and a Dana user couldn't pay at a LinkAja merchant. QRIS solved this fragmentation by creating a single, unified QR standard that all Indonesian payment apps must support. Today, Indonesia has over 30 million QRIS merchants — from street food stalls (warung) and motorbike taxi drivers to government offices and shopping malls — making it one of the world's largest QR payment networks by merchant count. More than 100 million Indonesians actively use QRIS-enabled payment apps. The QRIS Application Identifier (AID) is ID.CO.QRIS.WWW, embedded in EMV tag ID 26 of the QR payload. Every transaction is routed through BI-FAST, Bank Indonesia's national fast payment infrastructure, enabling real-time, 24/7 settlement.

The transformation QRIS brought to Indonesian commerce cannot be overstated. Before January 2020, a street vendor accepting digital payments would need to maintain separate registrations with GoPay, OVO, Dana, LinkAja, and ShopeePay — and display five different QR stickers. QRIS replaced all of this with a single code. The Bank Indonesia mandate was clear: from January 1, 2020, any payment provider operating in Indonesia must adopt QRIS. Non-compliant providers faced the risk of losing their operating licenses. The result was immediate and sweeping — within months, Indonesia's entire digital payment landscape unified under a single QR standard.

Bank Indonesia classifies all QRIS merchants into four tiers based on annual revenue. The category is encoded in the QRIS payload as the Merchant Criteria field and directly determines the MDR (Merchant Discount Rate) charged on each received payment. Usaha Mikro (Micro) with revenue under Rp 300 million per year pays 0.3% MDR. Usaha Kecil (Small) with revenue Rp 300M–2.5B and Usaha Menengah (Medium) with Rp 2.5B–50B both pay 0.7% MDR. Usaha Besar (Large) above Rp 50 billion also pays 0.7%. Government institutions and education facilities pay 0% MDR. These rates are regulated by Bank Indonesia to ensure accessibility for all business sizes.

A QRIS QR code encodes a sequence of TLV (Tag-Length-Value) fields as a plain ASCII string. Each field starts with a two-digit tag ID, followed by a two-digit length value, followed by the data content. The payload is defined by the EMV Merchant Presented Mode specification and extended with QRIS-specific fields by Bank Indonesia. Tag ID 26 is the heart of QRIS — it contains the Application Identifier ID.CO.QRIS.WWW (sub-tag 00) and the merchant's National Merchant ID / NMID (sub-tag 01). The final tag 63 contains the CRC16-CCITT checksum of the entire payload (including the literal text '6304'), expressed as a 4-character uppercase hex string. The transaction currency is always Indonesian Rupiah (IDR, ISO 4217 code 360).

Bank Indonesia has been actively expanding QRIS beyond Indonesia's borders through bilateral QR payment linkages with ASEAN neighbors and beyond. Under these linkages, tourists from connected countries can pay at Indonesian QRIS merchants using their home country's payment apps — no cash or currency exchange required. Indonesia has established connections with Thailand (PromptPay, since 2021), Malaysia (DuitNow, since 2022), Singapore (PayNow, since 2022), Philippines (QR Ph, since 2023), Vietnam (VietQR, since 2023), India (UPI, since 2023), and Japan (since 2024). The ASEAN cross-border QR payment initiative is part of a broader G20-aligned effort to interlink national fast payment systems globally.

All QRIS-enabled apps are fully interoperable. A customer with GoPay can scan the same QRIS code as a customer with BCA Mobile — the routing and settlement happen transparently through Bank Indonesia's infrastructure. As of 2025, over 50 payment service providers participate in the QRIS ecosystem, including GoPay, OVO, Dana, LinkAja, ShopeePay, BCA Mobile, Mandiri Livin', BRI Mobile, BNI Mobile, CIMB Niaga, Permata, Jenius, Allo Bank, and Bank Jago. Beyond consumer e-wallets, every major Indonesian state bank and private bank has integrated QRIS into their mobile banking apps.

Registering as a QRIS merchant is straightforward. You do not register directly with Bank Indonesia — instead, you apply through any Bank Indonesia-licensed Payment Service Provider (PJSP). Common routes include registration via your bank app (BCA, Mandiri, BRI, BNI, CIMB), via GoPay/Gojek, via OVO, or via Dana. Upon successful registration, you receive a National Merchant ID (NMID) — a unique identifier assigned by Bank Indonesia — and a printed QRIS sticker with your QR code. The NMID is encoded in your QRIS payload and is required for Bank Indonesia compliance. For developers and businesses who need to generate QRIS QR codes programmatically, qrpayhub.com provides a free browser-based QRIS generator.