PH LEADS SOUTHEAST ASIA IN COD: Cash still king for 1 in 5 Filipinos. By Ruelle Castro Published: October 15, 2026 10:01 PM Updated: October 16, 2026 9:01 AM The Philippines remains predominantly a cash economy, with most consumers preferring still to do purchases in cash despite the availability of e-payment platforms. A study conducted by digital payment infra provider Xendit, in partnership with ecommerce data firm Cube, showed that Filipinos prefer to do their online purchase on a cash-on-delivery (COD) basis, accounting for 23 percent of online purchases. Xendit's inaugural "Ecommerce Payments Momentum Report 2026" revealed that the Philippines remains a "wallet-first market," the company said in a statement, though real-time QR Ph and InstaPay payment is fast gaining grounds with volume expanding by 198 percent on Xendit's platform in the 15 months to April 2026, and making up 13 percent of Philippine e-commerce value. The study drew on transaction data and a survey of 1,000 Filipino shoppers, part of a 6,000-respondent Southeast Asian study. It showed that the Philippines ranks highest among the six markets surveyed in terms of COD transactions ahead of Vietnam' 16 percent, and overwhelming QR Ph and InstaPay transactions by nearly twice. "A third of Filipino respondents (33 percent) use it much less than a year ago, but 12 percent say nothing would make them switch, about twice the level in most other markets," Xendit said. "Filipino consumers have always been receptive to new technology and we see the same in digital payment, but they don't all pay the same way. One wants an e-wallet, another scans a QR Ph code, another uses a card. So for a business, going digital isn't about choosing one main payment method and steering everyone onto it. It's knowing which methods your digitally savvy customers actually use, offering those, and making sure each one is secure. If people can't find the option they use, or don't trust the checkout, they leave," said Nazim Ali, President of Xendit. Xendit said this meant that the next few years will mean that local merchants must manage three shifts at once - fast growth in real-time payments, a cash habit that is fading more slowly than elsewhere in the region, and fraud moving up business leaders' list of concerns. "The checkouts that hold on to sales will be the ones that offer the full range of ways Filipinos pay, with security built into each of them from the start," it said.

Key takeaways from Xendit's analyst day. Meng Liu, Principal Analyst Sep 23 2026 Payments companies often describe themselves as global platforms. But in Asia-Pacific, global reach matters little if a provider cannot make local payments work reliably. That was my main takeaway from Xendit's recent analyst day in Kuala Lumpur. The company presented a platform spanning payment acceptance, payouts, treasury, and embedded finance. It reported processing more than 544 million transactions and over $80 billion in payment volume in 2025. The scale was notable, but the infrastructure beneath it was more interesting: direct connections to local payment rails, multiple routes around potential failures, locally held licenses, and teams with deep knowledge of individual markets. The event highlighted two lessons for the payments industry. Local payment depth matters more than logo coverage. Xendit said it directly connects more than 100 local payment methods through one integration across markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong. A merchant may see a single API, but the work behind it remains highly local. It involves relationships with banks and payment networks, technical integrations, regulatory approvals, payment-status data, refunds, reconciliation, and operational support. The payment company also holds local payment licenses in seven countries in APAC, alongside licenses covering selected remittance, lending, financing, and banking services in Asia. Its portfolio includes a Major Payment Institution license in Singapore and a Money Service Operator license in Hong Kong. This regulatory footprint gives Xendit greater control over how it accepts, routes, settles, and pays out funds in its core markets, reducing its dependence on third-party intermediaries for selected services. This is why counting payment-method logos is becoming a weak way to compare providers. Two PSPs may offer the same method while relying on different infrastructure. Intermediaries can accelerate market entry, while direct connections can give a provider greater control over performance, data, product design, and exception handling. Refunds show why this matters. In the Philippines, a merchant can use Xendit's API to refund a GCash transaction fully, partially, or through several partial refunds against the same payment. Xendit submits the request to GCash, receives confirmation, and returns the status to the merchant through a webhook. GCash allows refunds for up to 180 days. In Indonesia, Xendit is developing QRIS refund capabilities through its direct acquiring role, including refunds beyond the standard seven-day window, broader issuer coverage, and API-based automation. Merchants should therefore look beyond coverage. They should ask who owns each connection, what data it returns, how refunds and disputes work, and who is accountable when something fails. Resilience requires redundant payment routes. Most providers discuss uptime in terms of cloud regions, data centers, and application availability. Those controls are essential, but a PSP can remain online while merchants cannot transact because a bank, connector, intermediary, or national network has failed. Xendit described multiple bank connectors and automatic failover triggers across Southeast Asia. One example was the 2023 LockBit ransomware attack on Indonesia's largest Islamic bank Bank Syariah Indonesia. The incident disrupted the bank's mobile banking, ATMs, and branches for days, affecting 18 million customers. Xendit's orchestration layer comprising multiple bank options and interbank transfer solutions routed payments away from the failed path to an alternative connection, allowing merchants to continue processing payments. The broader lesson is that payment resilience must be measured across the complete transaction path, not only within the PSP's software. Buyers should ask whether alternative connectors exist for critical methods, how degraded routes are detected, how duplicate payments are prevented, and whether reconciliation remains consistent after failover. What the industry should take away. Merchants should evaluate infrastructure ownership, fallback routes, refund capabilities, regulated entities, and reconciliation, not just pricing and method coverage. PSPs should invest selectively where direct connectivity, licensing, and redundant routing create measurable customer value. Banks should recognize that providers capable of simplifying this complexity are gaining greater influence over the merchant relationship. Xendit's next challenge is to turn its Southeast Asian depth into a differentiated cross-regional proposition without weakening the technical focus and payment expertise behind it. The broader principle applies well beyond one company: in payments, the infrastructure customers cannot see often determines the experience they ultimately receive. Forrester has dedicated research reports and blog posts on payments innovations such as local payments, stablecoin-based payments and agentic payments, including: Forrester clients can set up an inquiry or guidance session to discuss these topics with Forrester Research, Inc.. See Meng Liu at: Forrester Forum Singapore August 19, 2027, Singapore Cut through CX tech noise and buy smarter. Much of this year's agentic payments discussion has focused on protocols. At its merchant focused Voyage event on September 9 in Shanghai, Ant International took a broader view. Its senior executives argued that the most immediate AI opportunities lie in automating merchants' existing payment and finance workflows. At the same time, the company is building [...] Meng Liu September 15, 2026 When Open Standard announced Open USD on June 30, 2026, the initiative quickly attracted attention in the payments and fintech industries. At launch, I argued in my blog post that Open USD was an important development but not yet a proven payment network. A strong roster of supporters can create momentum, but this does not [...]

How xendit built Southeast Asia's payments backbone. SINGAPORE, September 23, 2026 (EZ Newswire) - Most payment companies plug into someone else's rails and resell the access. Xendit, led by CEO and co-founder Moses Lo, built its own instead - its own bank connections, e-wallet integrations, and regulatory licenses, market by market, across Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Greater China. The company started at Y Combinator in 2015, with a rule to solve real problems instead of chasing trends, building from inside the region rather than as an outsider. That decade of infrastructure work now processes $47.3 billion a year across more than 15,200 merchants. Global brands often assume a lighter-weight aggregator - reselling access to banks it doesn't own - is enough for a market this fragmented. Xendit's numbers say otherwise: its owned infrastructure touches 3% of Indonesia's GDP and 5% of the Philippines' GDP, a share resellers competing on price alone haven't matched. Governments are Rebuilding the Rails Southeast Asia's digital economy crossed roughly $300 billion by the end of 2025, backed by 600 million people and a combined GDP of $3 trillion. Governments across the region are racing to build their own real-time payment systems - a race Xendit has been pulled into, advising central banks on API design and fraud policy. Keeping pace with regulators who move market by market takes what Lo calls "the muscle": humility to treat each market as sovereign, curiosity to find unsolved problems, and doggedness to fix them for years, not quarters. That doggedness is what Indonesia took - Xendit's first and hardest market, three product pivots over twelve months to find a model that worked. That same muscle is already showing up outside the region - Xendit partners with large Latin American brands like Farmacias del Ahorro, an early signal of how transferable the approach could be globally. "Southeast Asia is arguably the hardest possible proving ground - different currencies, regulators, payment rails, and consumer habits within a single region," says Moses Lo, CEO and co-founder of Xendit. Xendit Owns the Rails, Not Wrappers Surviving a market that hard comes down to one decision, Lo says: own the infrastructure instead of renting it. Xendit draws that line between "processing" and "infrastructure" - processing touches a payment and passes it along someone else's pipes; infrastructure means owning them outright, with control over uptime, settlement speed, and pricing instead of inheriting someone else's limits. In Indonesia alone, Xendit routes payments through up to seven separate bank connections, so one failure doesn't take a transaction down with it. Native QR refunds in Thailand, for example - a feature Xendit says resellers can't offer - are a direct product of that ownership. "We've actually gone bottoms-up and said: we're going to build our own bank connections, our own e-wallet integrations directly with them, get our own licenses, build into the central bank systems - market by market - instead of reselling or wrapping someone else's infrastructure," says Lo. Licensing Is the Barrier Xendit Removes Xendit's merchant base now spans an individual seller and a licensed bank on the same infrastructure. Enterprise partners include Traveloka, which started with Xendit in Indonesia alone and now spans 180 countries, telco XL Smart, hospitality group Archipelago International (100+ hotel properties), and banks including BRI. The base has widened further, into education and "traditional corporate" sectors like insurance and utilities that need automation more than flexibility - a sign, Lo says, of infrastructure maturity, not just growth. That range is possible because Xendit holds direct bank and regulator relationships in each market - without them, it can't reach institutional-grade merchants. Licensing gets Xendit in the door, but trust keeps clients there, Lo says: Xendit often advises companies before they've even signed on, translating not just language but cultural context. "Unlike a lot of our competitors, we're pretty open and transparent about the realities of what we can and can't do," says Lo. Xendit Is Built for What's Next Real-time, account-to-account payments already outpace cards across most of Southeast Asia - QRIS, DuitNow, e-wallets lead - and Lo sees it as a preview of where global payments are heading, not a regional quirk. That ownership shows up in the details: Xendit runs one of the region's most complete QR and instant-transfer networks, including native refunds competitors still can't offer. Stablecoins are next, already used by enterprise clients moving hundreds of millions in volume - Xendit is a founding partner of the Open Transaction Layer, an industry protocol launched May 28, 2026, to standardize on-chain transaction coordination. AI is compressing a third trend: easier integrations are lowering switching costs, pushing small merchants toward running two or three PSPs instead of one. Lo weighs new rails against four questions: where end-user behavior is heading, what merchants want, where governments are moving, and what's good for the world. About Xendit Xendit is the financial technology platform built for businesses that move fast and scale globally. Rather than reselling access to someone else's rails, Xendit owns the infrastructure itself - bank connections, e-wallet integrations, and regulatory licenses in every market - delivering one unified solution for payments, disbursements, and financial services across Southeast Asia and beyond. That model removes the operational complexity that slows companies down, replacing fragmented local integrations with one intelligent infrastructure layer. Xendit serves businesses of all sizes, from high-growth startups to global enterprises, processing billions of dollars in transactions across Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Greater China, and Latin America, with more markets on its global expansion roadmap. For more information, visit xendit.co. Media Contact The Executive Insight on behalf of Xendit [email protected] +1 332-242-4643 For questions regarding this release or its content, contact [email protected] for immediate assistance.