I'm cashless in Jakarta

My first trip to a modern market - a good number of the stallholders have QRIS codes on their tables.

Indomaret, as all over Indonesia, can be paid using the gopay app.

I bought some stuff from a small electrical shop and more from a little hardware place - both paid using QRIS from my BCA app

If this carries on, I won't need to carry my wallet and I'll end up forgetting my ATM PIN.

I heard about QRIS and how easy it was to use, but it was a bit of a nothing thing in my last place so I never really used it - Jakarta is a different story.

At the moment, I’m visiting Canada and there is no need to carry cash over here at all…everyone here just taps their bank card & the transaction goes thru. In fact, it’s rare to see people pay cash for anything…Welcome to the modern digital world Indonesia!

Tap and pay is a thing here but I've hardly seen it used. One of my cards has that facility but the shops never try it.

We've skipped past that to a model that more closely resembles the Chinese version where everything is paid for using phone apps.

Unlike the Chinese, our apps are private business rather than government run, but the upshot for the customer is about the same.

One of the beauties of the way Indonesia has done this is the code (like a QR) can be read by all the payment apps so you can chose whichever you prefer.

That means people without bank accounts can use them.

My preferences are Bank Central Asia (BCA) and Gojek. The latter is because their ride, food delivery, and other services are especially handy for me, but others prefer OVO or Grab.

I've only used tap and pay (paywave) once before in my 18 days trip. The newer terminals that are used actually does support paywave, but I guess the staff don't know how to use it.

One thing that I liked is that the terminal actually prints out a QR code that people can use to scan for payment, and after payment is done it just prints out the receipt from the terminal (which is a pretty nice flow that is not available in my home country).

The QR framework for payment is also utilized in some other asian countries like thailand, malaysia, singapore, etc. And you can even do cross border transfer (ID to TH and vice versa, ID to MY and vice versa)