Australian Payments Network (AusPayNet), the payments industry self-regulatory body, has published guidelines for Quick Response (QR) codes as a payment method.

The guidelines will be voluntary for financial institutions, payment service providers, merchants and other payments industry participants and are designed to encourage consistency in how QR codes are used.

The growing popularity of QR codes for payment transactions is attributed to their ready adoption by consumers using a smartphone and the fact that QR code payments do not require specific hardware or acceptance devices, reducing barriers for merchants.

QR codes also allow richer data to be encoded in a payment transaction, making them useful when transactions are linked to loyalty, identity and reconciliation applications.

AusPayNet’s QR code payment guidelines are set out in two separate documents. These outline an EMVCo Merchant-Presented Mode (MPM) QR Code Standard and a Short QR Code Standard.

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