VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
I recently posted a long video talking about QRIS and e-Wallets in Indonesia and how useful they can be for a foreign visitor. I covered a lot of ground in that video, including a section in which I zeroed in on the specific benefits of using QRIS over cash and credit card. However, that part was so buried in the long video that I doubt that many people (maybe nobody) ever got that far.
So, one nice morning, I sat down over a cup of coffee and talked about these advantages so I can make a completely separate shorter video about just that topic.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
If you’re visiting Indonesia, this little square is something you’ll see everywhere. QRIS is Indonesia’s national QR code payment system. You scan this code with your e-wallet app, enter the amount you want to pay, hit confirm, and you’re done. No account with the shop, no credit cards exchanged, no conversation required.
So why does this actually matter? Let’s talk about the benefits and advantages.
The first set of advantages have to do with convenience and speed. QRIS is widely accepted at shops, restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, fast food restaurants, buses, trains—the list just goes on and on. You can use QRIS to pay for a ride in a Grab car, in a Gojek car, and in the future, the range of places accepting QRIS is only going to get bigger and bigger. You can also use QRIS online. And why not? When you think about it, a QRIS code doesn’t just have to be on a physical sign. It can be displayed on a computer screen or on a smartphone screen. So businesses put their QRIS code on their website and voila, you can buy train tickets, you can buy sporting event tickets, you can buy data packages for your smartphone, you can order deliveries to your hotel from Lazada and Shopee. And you can even order food delivered to your hotel when you don’t feel like going out and pay for all of it with QRIS.
Using QRIS is much faster and more efficient than fumbling around with your wallet, trying to sort through all of those old crumpled bills—faded, you can’t tell which one is which—that sort of thing. And I find that the lineup just goes much, much faster when people are paying with QRIS. One thing I noticed is that you go up to the cashier, find out how much you need to pay, you scan the QRIS code, and then you step aside while you complete the transaction on your phone. The next person in line goes up to the cashier. When you’re paying with cash, they tend to deal with one customer at a time—paying with cash, asking how much is it, dealing with all of that, and then that customer leaves, and the next one steps up. But with QRIS, it goes much, much faster.
A big one for me is that you no longer have to worry about small bills and having the correct change. A big problem for me as a foreign visitor in Indonesia is that no one ever seems to have enough change. Whatever you’re buying, you pull out a 100,000 rupiah note or a 50,000 rupiah note, they’re not going to have change for it. So I end up thinking about this all the time. I’m like hoarding small bills. I think about, do I have enough small change in my wallet? I often will see like a cold drink I want to buy, but then I don’t have the right change and I won’t even bother doing it because I don’t want the hassle of them not having enough change, having to send someone out looking for change. With QRIS, all of this worry about small change vanishes.
Another set of benefits have to do with safety and security and, to be honest, just peace of mind because in many ways using QRIS through an e-wallet app on your phone is safer than using cash. Think about it. With a wallet there’s always a risk of dropping your wallet. It’s very kind of lightweight, your wallet. You drop it, you don’t hear it hit the ground, but you’re never going to drop your smartphone. It’s going to make a clattering sound. You always know where your smartphone is. And with QRIS, you don’t have to carry around as much money in your wallet. You don’t have to worry as much about pickpockets, about fumbling with money and dropping some on the ground and not noticing that you lost it. You don’t have to worry about getting the correct change. Maybe you get shortchanged by accident with money, but with QRIS, you know exactly how much you’re supposed to pay and you see exactly how much you did pay. So I think there are a lot of security benefits to using QRIS.
Also, with QRIS, an unintended benefit is that everyone pays the same price. You don’t have to worry about paying the foreigner price. Everyone scans the QR code—foreigners and locals all pay exactly the same price. And when you use QRIS, there’s a clear detailed record of the transaction. If something goes wrong, you don’t have to concern yourself with memory. You don’t get into this conversation about, oh, but I gave you 100,000 rupiah. Oh, no, you only gave me 50,000 rupiah. If there is some sort of a problem or dispute with cash, there’s nothing to refer to. But when you use QRIS, there’s a clear record—the time of the payment, the amount of the payment, and the name of the merchant. It’s all right there, and then everybody can see it.
Some other benefits to QRIS have to do with language and just feeling at ease in a foreign environment. For one thing, you don’t have to fight as much with the language barrier. I take the time to learn numbers in Indonesian and I think I understand them based on the podcast I listen to and all of my practicing. But in the real world, when I buy something and the clerk tells me how much it is, I miss it entirely. They use different words than what I learned in my lesson. They speak faster and my brain just can’t pick it up. So I’m always fighting through the language barrier. With QRIS, you bypass all of that.
One thing I’ve noticed in particular is that when you’re using QRIS, you’re sort of working through a screen and that makes the merchant—the guy behind the cash register—more inclined to show you the amount on their screen, if you see what I mean. If you’re paying in cash and you say, “Berapa harganya? How much?” Their cue, because you’ve asked them, “How much is it?” They’re going to tell you how much it is in words and then you don’t understand what they say and then you’re like, “Excuse me.” And you’re trying to get them to say it slower or more clearly and they just say it at the same speed. But somehow when you start scanning a QR code, it triggers something in them that they take out a calculator and they put the amount on a calculator and show it to you or they take their computer screen and they turn it around. You’re working on a screen, so they offer you their screen and they turn their computer around and then you can see the amount. It just sort of makes everything flow much better.
And I mean, I have a real pet peeve here in Indonesia with shops like Indomaret and Alfamart because you go to one of those stores thinking you’re not going to have to struggle about payment because everything you know is going to be done on a cash register. But for whatever reason, my experience in Indonesia is that the screen that faces the customer, they never turn it on. So even though they’ve punched, they’ve tallied up your purchase on the cash register, they can see the amount on their screen and then you’re looking—they don’t display it on the screen facing the customer. And that’s fine for local people because they speak the language fluently. But then I always end up leaning over the counter like, “Can I, can I, can I look at that screen? Can I see what’s there?” And then I, you know, I give them the correct change. But when I’m using an e-wallet, they anticipate that and somehow they produce the amount on a screen and show it to me on the screen. And it just means I just feel much more relaxed in this foreign environment as I go about my day making lots of little purchases.
And related to that, I’ve noticed that when you use QRIS, it encourages exploration outside the tourist zone. You end up having new experiences. You feel more courageous. Like I noticed it in myself when I was in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. I would be out walking in some very local traditional neighborhood and if I see a tiny restaurant that only the locals go to and if I see the Touch ‘n Go QR code—they have a sign that says we accept Touch ‘n Go—I’m much more likely to go into that restaurant, to go into that shop because I know that whatever I do in there, whatever I order, whatever I purchase, the payment is going to be painless. And the same thing happens here in Indonesia where I am in Banda Aceh. If I walk by a fruit stall or a corner store, a corner restaurant jammed with locals and it’s a very chaotic, noisy environment and I’m like hesitant like, ah, I don’t know what to do in this place. I don’t know how to order. I don’t know what to order. Oh, and then you see the QRIS code and so much of that anxiety just melts away. It’s like an anchor, something that you know how to use. So now I go into that place, I sit down, I get my order, and I confidently get up, scan the QRIS code, they show me the amount on a screen, and I pay them. Just taking away the tension surrounding payment just makes me braver. It makes me go places where I would normally be too scared to go, have a certain nervousness about going there. And I think that would turn out to be true for a lot of people.
Another set of benefits to using QRIS is just related to the modern social world, modern life and living. So for example, using QRIS, it really helps you budget. And this was an unexpected benefit for me because I’m not a big budgeter. I don’t keep track of things. I’m a low-budget person for sure, but my approach to being on a budget is just to pay for the cheapest thing I can find. I get the cheapest meals, the cheapest hotel rooms, the cheapest way of traveling. I just look for the cheapest option. That’s how I budget. Keeping a list of everything you buy, adding up the numbers, all that kind of stuff is just way too much work. But what I learned as I’ve been using QRIS is that there is a very simple, very clear built-in budget feature. You just click on the budget button and it’s all laid out for you. All your transactions have been recorded and the budgeting feature in my GoPay e-wallet automatically sorts it of course by day, by week, by month and even by category. So just at a glance, I don’t have to do anything. As long as I use QRIS to make the purchase, QRIS automatically saves that purchase into the in-built budgeting feature and just lays it out graphically and you can just see everything at a glance. I didn’t think I would need this. I didn’t think I wanted it, but now that I have it, I find it very, very useful.
And finally, I’ve discovered that QRIS and e-wallets provide a lot of fun and interesting ways to send and receive money. So, for example, it might be your friend’s birthday and you want to give them a little bit of money. Oh, happy birthday. Here, treat yourself to a nice cup of coffee. You can do it with your e-wallet. Sure. But using QRIS and an e-wallet, it packages it digitally into a nice birthday card. So instead of just sending your friend money, oh, here’s some money. You use the gift feature and you choose birthday and it will send your friend a birthday card in the e-wallet app. They open it up. Oh, the envelope appears on their screen. Happy birthday. The envelope opens and then a card comes out with the amount of money on it and it’s deposited to their e-wallet. It’s like, how nice is that? And when you’re sending a gift through the gift feature, it has different themes. So, you could choose a birthday card, a Christmas card, a congratulations card. All these different themes are built into it. At least again, they’re built into the e-wallet that I’m using, and I’m assuming other e-wallets have a similar feature.
And GoPay has a very interesting feature where you can remind people that they owe you money, right? It’s a very awkward situation, you know—a friend borrowed some money from you, promising to pay it back in a week, and they forgot, and you’re like, “What do I do?” It’s very awkward. With your e-wallet, you can send them a little reminder and the reminder comes with a QR code. All they have to do is scan the code. The money comes to your e-wallet. So, you don’t have to contact Rocky, send Rocky to go break thumbs. You can just send your friends and your acquaintances just a friendly QRIS code, e-wallet code reminder. Oh, remember that 40,000 rupiah you borrowed last week for lunch? You know, just a little nudge and nobody has to get their thumbs broken.
What I really like about all those benefits and advantages I mentioned is that they aren’t just technical. Oh, this is better, this is faster, this is easier. There’s also an element there where all of these features, all of these payment ways are adapting to modern life. It’s shifting and changing to incorporate the new ways that people are living today. And I really like that.
And of course, you don’t have to use QRIS. Cash still works fine. You can use cash all across Indonesia, no problem. Credit cards are accepted in a lot of places, but just having QRIS and an e-wallet, it just gives you one more option. It’s just one more tool in your financial toolbox and that can give a foreigner here in Indonesia just a little bit of peace of mind.