In today’s digital economy, accepting payment is no longer just about completing a sale. It’s become a marker of how ready a business is to scale. And if you are an ambitious merchant or payment provider looking to grow in the Asia Pacific (APAC) market, you already know the opportunity is massive, and so is the complexity.
Consider this: APAC remains the world’s largest real-time payments market, projected to see more than $351.5B real-time transactions by 2028.1 Four of the five countries leading this surge2—India, China, Thailand, and South Korea—each operate their own national system, like UPI or PromptPay. This dynamic environment, where local systems are accelerating payment volume, means businesses must integrate a multitude of local payment methods, currencies, and rapidly evolving regulations to achieve true cross-border scalability.
In turn, to keep up with the demand for always-on payments acceptance across this diverse landscape, providers must deliver tailored payment experiences that feel native to each country while still giving merchants the consistency and scalability they need to grow.
Modular payment solutions to promote acceptance
Success in APAC hinges on the ability to link traditional card acceptance with a fast-growing array of local payment innovations, from national schemes, mobile wallets, QR systems, and more. Stitching it all together manually is costly, slow, and nearly impossible to maintain.
With the Visa Acceptance Platform, providers can meet these diverse needs by connecting to a single partner for flexible access to acceptance and value-added services. The platform is designed to be modular, allowing businesses to "plug and play" the specific payment capabilities they need, when they need them.
This modular architecture delivers a clear advantage: accelerated speed to market. Instead of investing months of resources on complex integration projects, the Visa Acceptance Platform allows new capabilities, such as accepting local QR code solutions or Tap to Phone, to be added without major platform redevelopment. This level of agility gives businesses the competitive edge needed to capture revenue quickly, respond to shifting customer behaviors, and unlock new opportunities across APAC’s rapidly expanding commerce landscape.
Unified, one-stop payments platform
Besides customer experience, the complexity of managing multiple service providers also affects operational efficiency. From compliance to fraud management to reconciliation, businesses often struggle under the weight of fragmented systems, many of which are legacy infrastructures unable to keep pace with innovation.
The Visa Acceptance Platform gives you the foundation and power to build the one-stop payments solution that businesses want, with:
- Open platform: Offers the flexibility to integrate customized local payment methods and tools seamlessly, allowing expansion without being locked into proprietary hardware or software. In addition, acquirers and merchants can tap into Visa’s built-in fraud and post-purchase management capabilities, strengthening risk controls while reducing operational burden.
- Unified view: Provides a single, streamlined view of transactions and data across all regions. This ability to consolidate data significantly enhances efficiency for businesses of all sizes, simplifying complex reconciliation processes and ensuring streamlined regulatory compliance.
- Robust infrastructure: Ensures near-perfect 99.999%3 uptime and global reach of 160+ countries and territories4 for merchants to confidently embrace digital innovation and maintain business continuity, regardless of local shifts in the diverse APAC market.
Regional growth powered by localized payment experiences
With the growth of APAC as a commerce powerhouse, businesses and customers are demanding seamless, localized payment experiences. Payment providers can no longer afford to offer fragmented, siloed solutions, but must facilitate the strategic unlocking of potential across the region’s dynamic payments market.
The Visa Acceptance Platform offers a robust and reliable foundation for agility and reliability, helping merchants and payment providers confidently embrace local payment shifts, ensure continuous commerce, and strategically capture the next wave of growth in the region.
Ready to turn APAC’s payment complexity into your competitive advantage? Connect with our team to get started.
1 Global Real-Time Payments Growth “Sustainable” As New Use Cases Push Transactions to Record Highs – ACI Worldwide Report, 2024
2 Global Real-Time Payments Growth “Sustainable” As New Use Cases Push Transactions to Record Highs – ACI Worldwide Report, 2024
3 Measured and validated by the Visa Operations and Infrastructure monthly reporting, as reported on Jan 1, 2025.
4 Cybersource. Data is measured and validated from an internal instance of Tableau Server based on billable transactions from the Cybersource and Authorize.net Transaction Fact data sources.
Disclosure: Case studies, comparisons, statistics, research, and recommendations are provided “AS IS” and intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for operational, marketing, legal, technical, tax, financial, or other advice. Visa neither makes any warranty or representation as to the completeness or accuracy of the information within this document, nor assumes any liability or responsibility that may result from reliance on such information. The information contained herein is not intended as investment or legal advice, and readers are encouraged to seek the advice of a competent professional where such advice is required.