APAC Payment Trends Show That Its Rails Are Finally Converging. The Next Contest Is the Interface.

Asia Pacific’s payments infrastructure problem is close to being solved, yet its interface problem is just getting started.

That split runs through Endava’s third APAC payments trends report, which has tracked five trends since 2022: real-time payments, super apps, payments acceptance, orchestration, and stablecoins and CBDCs.

Read alongside what regulators and central banks have shipped this year, the report describes a region where the plumbing debate is ending and a new fight, over who owns the customer conversation, is beginning.

Nexus turns bilateral spaghetti into multilateral

The infrastructure story has a genuine milestone behind it. Nexus Global Payments, the entity set up by the central banks of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand to run the BIS-incubated Nexus scheme, has moved the project from a Bank for International Settlements experiment started in 2021 into practical implementation.

Indonesia joined as the sixth member country in 2026, having initially observed alongside the European Central Bank.

The design answers a critical failure. Bilateral corridors such as PayNow-UPI and PayNow-PromptPay worked, but each required bespoke legal, FX and compliance arrangements, and the model could not scale.

Nexus replaces that with a single multilateral connection point: a domestic instant payment system links once to Nexus and reaches every other country in the network, in support of the G20 targets on cross-border payment cost, speed and transparency.

Endava’s report frames the open question well: whether a network spanning more than 700 million connected accounts proves compelling enough to pull in Australia and New Zealand, neither of which is a member.

New Zealand at least now has a mandate to modernise, with the government confirming in November 2025 that the Reserve Bank would lead the introduction of real-time payments.

Australia shows legacy rails die slowly

Australia is the region’s cautionary tale on infrastructure transition. The industry’s plan to decommission Direct Entry, the country’s workhorse account-to-account system, and migrate volumes worth close to $18 trillion to the New Payments Platform has run into sustained resistance over cost and the absence of batch payment capability, according to the Endava report.

The RBA’s own assessment is blunter. Its risk assessment on the Bulk Electronic Clearing System found that the industry has yet to arrive at a shared vision for account-to-account (A2A) payments, with insufficient coordination, planning and certainty around the transition.

The March 2026 update recorded that of 11 institutions that told the RBA they intended to connect to the NPP in 2024 or 2025, only five previously unconnected institutions managed it.

AusPayNet, which set the original June 2030 target date, has committed to managing the transition responsibly without disruption to essential payments such as welfare, pension and salary flows. It is working through an ACCC-authorised industry process to rebuild consensus.

The likelier outcome, and the one comparable markets have already chosen, is co-existence of old and new rails rather than a clean cutover. That is a defensible engineering answer. It is also a standing tax on every institution forced to run two systems indefinitely.

The interface layer is the new battleground

The more consequential shift in the report sits above the rails entirely. Super apps built their dominance on distribution: Tencent reports combined Weixin and WeChat monthly active users above 1.4 billion, and Grab posted 23% year-on-year revenue growth to $819 million in Q2 2025.

Endava argues that the next phase will be decided by AI, as Kakao partners with OpenAI on the Kanana AI agent, CommBank pilots its Companion agent inside an app used by more than nine million Australians daily, and GoTo co-develops Sahabat-AI, a large language model tuned to Indonesian languages that already powers services in its GoPay and Gojek ecosystem.

The constraint is trust, and it is unevenly distributed. Worldpay’s survey of 8,000 consumers across seven markets found openness to letting AI agents browse and purchase reaching 95% in China and 85% in Singapore, against 71% in the US and 47% in France, with Australian consumers among the more resistant to identity theft and loss of control.

“Consumers are intrigued by the convenience of AI shopping, but confidence will determine adoption,” said Cindy Turner, Worldpay’s chief product officer.

The structure is reinforced by Walmart’s experience with OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, where purchases completed inside ChatGPT converted at one-third the rate of transactions that clicked out to Walmart’s own site, prompting the retailer to embed its own Sparky assistant in the chat interface instead.

Regulatory pressure on interchange, surcharging and digital wallets is squeezing card economics at the same time, which gives both merchants and platforms a reason to experiment.

Where the leverage now sits

For a decade, advantage in APAC payments belonged to whoever controlled the rails or the wallet.

Nexus commoditises the cross-border rail, while Australia’s Direct Entry saga shows domestic rails changing only at the pace of the slowest bank.

The variable that actually differentiates markets in 2026 is consumer willingness to delegate a payment decision to software, and that is a function of regulation, platform concentration and trust.

The unresolved question for the year ahead is whether the region’s regulators, who built the rails, move as decisively on the liability and consent rules that agentic payments will demand.