Closing the APAC payments gap with an open payments platform

The era of one-size-fits-all payment stacks is over, particularly in a market as diverse as APAC. With a flexible, open payment platform, businesses can choose, integrate, and deploy capabilities without having to overhaul their entire system.

Here’s what that flexibility looks like: 

• For a small business in Southeast Asia: Merchants can quickly integrate new local payment methods—Tap to Phone, in-country wallets, or region-specific instalment payment schemes—all flowing through a unified experience. For instance, this open, modular approach supports Vietnam’s broader shift toward contactless mobility. Through Visa’s “tap-to-ride” rollout—first in Ho Chi Minh City and now on Hanoi Metro Line 2A—everyday commuters can pay with a simple card tap, bringing the convenience of open-loop payments to millions. Another strong example is Visa’s recent partnership with HitPay to expand card payment acceptance in the Philippines. It shows how these open platforms empower SMEs, supporting frictionless digital payment acceptance for small business owners without the need for heavy infrastructure. 
• For a large eCommerce marketplace in Singapore: Marketplaces gain instant access to enterprise tools, such as sophisticated fraud management and secure online acceptance, bringing with them high-level security and consumer trust. With capabilities like scheme-agnostic network tokenization, shoppers now have a friction-free payment checkout that helps maximize security and helps minimize declines.
• For a growing fintech in Australia: Fast-growing fintechs can draw on the platform's API-first architecture and global processing solutions to focus on what makes their product unique, be it virtual card issuing or dynamic risk scoring, improving their time-to-market and reducing development costs. They can also integrate specialized fraud detection tools to gain adaptive behavioral insights across cards, payments, and acquiring scenarios.
  
  Just as important, an open platform grows together with the business. By connecting to a single platform, merchants and acquirers can easily reach multiple countries and territories, accepting a wide range of local payment methods and currencies. Even if a business begins with a single market or a smaller set of payment options, the foundation is already in place for expansion—regionally or globally—whenever the time is right. This means a small setup today can become tomorrow’s gateway to new customers, new markets, and new revenue opportunities.
   

To succeed in a $29 trillion market,¹ businesses need more than local payment options; they need systems that stay up and running all the time. In a world where commerce never stops, even a short outage can mean lost sales, unhappy customers, and long-term brand damage.

The Visa Acceptance Platform is engineered for resilience, with a near-perfect 99.999% uptime.² With a global reach of 220+ countries and territories,³ we are constantly monitoring worldwide network health to maintain continuous service.

Visa keeps things running smoothly, thanks to its strong investments in technology—a core belief that powers everything across the Visa network. Every day, millions of people around the world swipe, tap, or click to pay with the expectation that their transactions are processed instantly and securely. Behind that split-second moment is Visa’s network processing up to 83,000 transaction messages per second worldwide,⁴ built to uphold merchant trust and global availability.

Two dedicated command centers at the heart of Visa keep this core network running 24/7:

• The Network Operations Centre (NOC): Provides real-time monitoring of every transaction flowing through our system, with stress-test capacity exceeding 65,000 messages per second.⁴
• The Risk Operations Centre (ROC): Acts as a frontline against fraud, processing issues in real time and containing attacks within minutes.

Visa’s strong focus on reliability helps keep payments running smoothly, which boosts approval rates and keeps businesses operating without interruptions. This makes uptime not just a tech measure, but a key factor in revenue and customer trust.

The fast-changing APAC market requires a payment strategy that can move as quickly as the region itself. By using an open platform built on modularity and resilience, businesses can tackle today’s complexity while future-proofing their ability to grow across APAC and beyond.

Learn how an open platform can transform your payment strategy and infrastructure in APAC.