As digital commerce matures in Southeast Asia, the region’s shift to digital payments is accelerating as merchant searches jump, according to a PayMongo’s analysis of five years of Google Trends data across six markets: Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
PayMongo said in a statement on Wednesday comparing the first half of 2026 with the same period in 2022, merchant-intent searches (the terms sellers type when they want to accept digital payments) rose 223 percent in Indonesia, 175 percent in Vietnam, 66 percent in the Philippines, and 45 percent in Singapore.
The fastest-growing terms in the region are unambiguous about what sellers want: “accept PayNow” in Singapore is up more than tenfold, “buat QRIS”(translation: create a QRIS code) is up 626 percent in Indonesia, and “tạo mã QR ngân hàng” (create a bank QR) is up 215 percent in Vietnam.
The shift is most evident in searches for each country’s national QR payment system.
Interest in Indonesia’s QRIS grew 475 percent, making it the region’s fastest.
The Philippines follows: QR Ph searches more than tripled (+208 percent), and merchant phrases like “accept QR Ph” only began registering from 2025, the signature of an acceptance wave still gathering.
Thailand’s PromptPay, the region’s oldest rail, grew a steady 50 percent; Singapore’s SGQR rose 31 percent.
Singapore shows what a late-stage market looks like from the seller’s side. Its rails are the region’s oldest and its corporates digitized years ago, searches for “PayNow Corporate,” the banks’ formal term, are down 61 percent, but “accept PayNow” is up more than tenfold as hawkers, freelancers and micro-sellers arrive last.
Vietnam splits the story in two. Consumer-side searches for “quét mã QR"(how to scan a QR code) eased from their pandemic-era highs, the signature of a habit already learned.
Merchant-side QR creation moved the opposite way: “tạo mã QR ngân hàng”(create a bank QR) is up 215 percent since the first half of 2022, while &”tạo mã VietQR” and “mã QR nhận tiền” (QR to receive money) – both barely registering in 2022 – are at their five-year peaks today.
Consistent with a market where consumer scanning is already habitual, it’s the sellers who are rushing in.
Malaysia and Thailand show the other end of the curve. Both compressed merchant onboarding into their pandemic-era e-wallet stimulus programs, and searches have eased since: DuitNow is down 15 percent from its 2023 peak, with attention consolidating onto the interoperable rail after wallet-by-wallet adoption finished.
The pattern is consistent: search growth is steepest where merchant onboarding is most recent – whether that’s a whole market, as in Indonesia and the Philippines, or the last segment of an established one, as in Singapore.
And in every market where payment searches are still climbing, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore, the merchant side of QR is now growing faster than the consumer side.
Meanwhile growth within wallets now belongs to challengers. Vietnam’s ZaloPay more than doubled (+115 percent); in the Philippines, Maya’s payment searches grew roughly twenty-five-fold from a near-zero 2022 base, while GCash, the region’s most established wallet in search terms, grew a steady 35 percent.
Meanwhile, Dana for Business in Indonesia grew by 35 percent.
That said, five years of search data point in one direction: Southeast Asia’s sellers are moving to digital payments, and its national QR systems are where they’re landing.
Indonesia and Vietnam are surging, the Philippines and Singapore are climbing steadily, while Thailand and Malaysia, whose merchant adoption was compressed into the pandemic-era stimulus programs, have already crested.
The shift is consistent with the region’s central-bank digitization agendas, from Bank Indonesia’s QRIS targets to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’digital transformation roadmap.
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