Vietnam's national instant payment system has become one of the most heavily used real-time payment rails in Southeast Asia. NAPAS 247, operated by the National Payment Corporation of Vietnam, processed 8.9 billion instant transfers in 2024, a 33.8 percent increase from the prior year. The system handles an estimated daily volume exceeding 24 million transactions based on the annualized figures, and serves 68 member organizations across a network of more than 80 million consumers.
Much of this expansion has been driven by VietQR, the standardized QR code payment format launched in 2021 that is now accepted across all Vietnamese banks. VietQR currently processes approximately 15 million transfer transactions per day, accounting for a substantial share of total NAPAS 247 volume. In a country where cash usage was historically leading, the QR standard has proved transformative. Vietnam recorded 5.5 billion cashless transactions in the first quarter of 2025 alone, reflecting the broader shift in consumer payment behavior.
To sustain this trajectory, NAPAS completed a comprehensive upgrade of its instant payment platform in partnership with technology provider Hyperlogy and database vendor PingCAP. The migration from a centralized architecture using specialized hardware to a distributed system built on TiDB enables flexible scalability through additional application and database nodes while achieving zero-downtime data center failover. Previously, switching the active site between NAPAS's two data centers required approximately 30 minutes of downtime and a complex manual process. The overall NAPAS platform now processes 180 million total transactions per day across all services, including card, ATM, and point-of-sale transactions alongside instant transfers, with an average annual growth rate of 60 percent across the platform.
Cross-border connectivity represents the next strategic priority for NAPAS. On December 2, 2025, the corporation launched a cross-border QR code payment service with China in partnership with UnionPay International, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Vietcombank. The initial phase enables Chinese tourists to scan VIETQRGlobal codes at Vietnamese merchants including shopping malls, retail stores, tourist attractions, and restaurants. A reciprocal connection planned for early 2026 will allow Vietnamese consumers to pay at UnionPay merchants in China using their banking applications. NAPAS has outlined further plans to extend QR payment connectivity to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.
For 2025, NAPAS projects volume growth of 24 percent and value growth of 8 percent for its instant payment service, with VietQR transfers expected to grow 27 percent in volume. Among Southeast Asian peers, NAPAS 247's 8.9 billion annual transactions in 2024 placed it well ahead of Indonesia's BI-FAST at 3.4 billion, though behind Thailand's PromptPay which processes over 70 million transactions daily. Vietnam's rapid infrastructure investment and continued growth trajectory suggest the system's regional importance will continue to expand.