From 6 October 2026, eligible Wise customers in Singapore can scan local QR codes in more than 50 destinations and build a travel eSIM plan day by day, all inside the Wise app. It arrives right before the year-end travel rush, and it goes after the stall that only takes a local QR code and the roaming bill waiting at home.
Wise calls the payment half Scan to Pay, and the company says it’s the first app to put a global QR scanner and customisable eSIM plans together for travellers. Singapore customers are among the first in the world to get the pairing, which makes a pleasant change from watching a feature launch everywhere else first!
87% Hit a Payment Wall Abroad
Wise backs the launch with a survey it commissioned from YouGov, which polled 14,000 travellers across ten countries. Across that group, 61% said they’d hit payment hurdles overseas, and 40% had missed out on a local experience because of payment barriers.
The Singapore numbers are sharper. Among Singapore adults who travelled internationally in the last 12 months, 87% ran into payment trouble. The top challenge was accessing and setting up local QR codes and e-wallets, alongside cash hassles such as carrying wads of notes or finding a reliable money changer or ATM. That friction cost 51% of them a local experience, the sort the survey describes as street food vendors and independent artisan shops.
Wise paid for the research and sells the fix, so read it as the company’s argument for the product. The scene is hard to dispute, though: a queue forming behind you, a QR code taped to the counter, and a phone full of apps that can’t read it. Every one of those moments is a sale the vendor never made, so the problem cuts both ways.
One Scanner, 50+ Destinations
Cards work fine at big hotels and airport duty-free, but Wise points out that street-level merchants in many countries run entirely on domestic QR networks built for locals. Getting in has usually meant downloading a single-use wallet, then giving up when it asks for a local bank account.
Scan to Pay gets around that in two ways. The first is direct connections to national schemes, so the app that already reads PayNow codes at home now handles DuitNow in Malaysia, QR Ph in the Philippines, Swiss QR-bill in Switzerland, and Qvik in Hungary. The Malaysian link follows Wise’s direct integration with PayNet, the country’s national payments network, announced at the end of July.
The second route is a partnership with Alipay+, the wallet gateway run by Ant International, and this is the one that opens up the Chinese mainland. Wise says eligible customers can pay at millions of Alipay+ merchants there without a Chinese bank card, a local mobile number, or a separate app. By Wise’s figures, Alipay+ connects more than 150 million merchants across over 220 markets.
For a Singapore reader, DuitNow and China matter most. DuitNow covers Malaysia, the nearest destination on the list. China is the bigger unlock, since Wise itself notes that cash and foreign cards aren’t commonly accepted on the mainland. The Alipay+ coverage runs on to South Korea, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Argentina, and Mexico, among others.
Data Sized to Your Itinerary
The eSIM (a digital SIM you download instead of slotting in a plastic card) is supplied by Gigs U.K. Ltd, with Wise handling payment and administration. Standard regional plans cover more than 150 destinations. Customisable plans are open to customers in Singapore, Malaysia, the UK, the European Economic Area (EEA), the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.
The custom plan is the part that changes how a trip gets planned. You set the exact data allowance and the exact number of days, matched to the itinerary. Wise is pitching this against the fixed packages travel eSIMs are usually sold in, and Airalo’s plans, for comparison, generally run three to 30 days.
The smaller touches add up. The eSIM installs once and stays on the phone for future trips, data only starts counting when the phone connects to a supported network at the destination, and in-app guidelines help estimate how much to buy. Wise will refund any plan that’s bought and never used, which is the detail worth remembering the next time a boss cancels leave at the last minute!
The sensible move is to build a quote in the Wise app and hold it against your telco’s roaming pass before paying for either.
What to Check Before Flying
Both tools are for eligible Wise Account customers, so open the app and confirm they appear before counting on them at a night market. The destination list deserves a careful read too. Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam don’t appear among the QR destinations Wise published, so keep a card or some cash handy there. The eSIM reaches further than the scanner does.
The rest of the app fills in around those two. Wise lists pay-as-you-go airport lounge passes, a global ATM map, and multi-currency bill splitting for the friend who always “forgets” to transfer. It’s a long way from 2011, when Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus started the company in London as TransferWise, a money-transfer service that took its current name in 2021.
SK Saraogi, Asia Pacific CEO at Wise, put the goal plainly: “Travellers shouldn’t have to set up a new wallet or hunt for an ATM just to buy breakfast from a street food vendor.” Hard to argue with breakfast.
If a December trip is already booked, the homework is short. Read how Wise QR payments work, size up a plan on the Wise eSIM page, and try a PayNow scan at home so the first attempt isn’t at a crowded stall overseas. Then go and order the thing the locals are queueing for!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Wise.
Read us first on Google: add DANAMIC as a preferred source and our stories show up more in your Top Stories and AI results.
