In 2011, Alibaba's financial services arm Alipay adopted QR codes as a means to have offline stores accept payment from the wallet function of its flagship app.

"Penetration rates of credit cards were low, cash was king, and there was no big player that could gather the whole country, nor any bank that could roll out mobile payments in the existing system."

That state of affairs meant that the West’s embrace of near-field communications (NFC) tech to power tap-to-pay services that relied on credit and debit cards – either standalone or virtualized in smartphones – had little chance of success in China.

While QR code payments have become utterly ubiquitous across Asia, Christophe Uzureau, a VP analyst at Gartner, told The Register the many schemes across the region are "highly fragmented."

Dr Ondrus drew on experiences with Singapore's hawker markets – outdoor food courts - to illustrate how the island nation consolidated its QR code payment schemes and plugged them into a common backend.

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