SEA Payments Market Map
Licensed players, clearing rails and fee structures across six markets, with an M&A target list.
Summary
Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore hold 214 licensed payment institutions between them. Reconciling licence categories was the bulk of the work: an "e-wallet" permission connects directly to central bank clearing in Indonesia but must route through a bank agent in Vietnam.
The map is built in four layers — licensing and supervision, clearing rails, fee structure, and the ownership and agency links between institutions. Each layer carries its data cut-off date and a source document number so you can check it yourself.
The fee layer holds the counterintuitive finding: headline cross-border acquiring rates are lowest in Vietnam at 1.6%, but once the mandatory local settlement account and FX conversion step are added, landed cost exceeds Thailand's headline 2.3%. That gap between headline and landed cost appears four times across the six markets, each traceable to one extra hop in the clearing path; section three lists the hops and their cost…
26 more pages of country detail, the ownership maps and the M&A target list in XLSX
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