Opinion: Why QR code payment isn’t the future despite impressive rise

Photo credit: Thomas Leuthard.

As usual, I exhausted the little creativity I had to find the perfect gift for my mom on Mother’s Day. Luckily, I encountered this Pandora monkey pendant, which suits my mother perfectly because her zodiac sign is monkey.

As I was finally feeling relieved from the pressure of finding the perfect gift, my heart rate rose again when I realized that I could not find a way to pay for the monkey pendant.

Apparently, Pandora’s Chinese online store has completely localized itself and only supports three types of payments: Alipay (the financial arm of Alibaba), WeChat Pay, and UnionPay (the Chinese equivalent of Visa and MasterCard).

How am I going to get this monkey pendant to China without having access to any of the three payment methods, I thought.

I decided to ask my friends on WeChat and soon, a good friend suggested sending her the payment link so she could pay from her Alipay account. However, as great as this feature was, I couldn’t use it because I hadn’t been officially verified by Alipay as a legitimate Chinese citizen via OTP (one-time password). This route was a dead end.

While disappointed at losing the monkey pendant, my friend made another suggestion. Since Alipay supports QR code scanning, why don’t I take a picture of the item’s QR code so she can scan it from her phone and pay directly?

Though extremely suspicious, I sent her the photo (see above) but didn’t believe this would work by any chance. Was this even secure?

But guess what? It worked. It worked seamlessly. Two seconds after my friend received the image, she scanned it with her phone, and the web page on my laptop said “payment success.”

My mother received the gift the next day.

As a banking consultant, I probably shouldn’t be over-excited about a payment solution that’s based on a 20th century technology. However, I couldn’t help but think how brilliant the idea was to enable payment with simple images and a camera phone.

And contrary to some perceptions that scanning and entering passwords are cumbersome, I, along with millions of Chinese consumers, have found paying by scanning a QR code extremely simple and intuitive. Even the homeless in China started using QR codes from WeChat Pay to collect contributions. They generate a unique bar code from WeChat, print it out, and place it around their neck for people to scan and pay easily.