By late morning, the rhythm at Mustika’s* food stall is familiar: orders called out, sauces measured by instinct, customers hovering with lunch on their mind. What’s new is the quiet choreography happening in her hand. “To help me run my business, I use multiple e-commerce platforms,” she says, less a slogan than a survival strategy for a 50-year-old micro-merchant in urban Indonesia, stitching together sales from walk-ins, delivery apps, and the steady drip of digital payments.
Her children were the first to nudge her into that world. She began as a user, then realized she could become a merchant on the same platforms. Now she offers customers choices at the counter, cash when that’s what’s available, QR payments when speed matters, and mobile wallets when convenience wins. The shift didn’t just add payment options; it changed how she sees her own business. The apps’ reporting tools, daily activity, transaction history, even automated summaries sent to her email, turn what used to be memory and guesswork into something closer to an account of record.
That confidence didn’t appear by magic (or by downloading one more app). Mustika traces a turning point to 2020, when she started using Indonesia’s QR standard (QRIS) after joining local MSME support networks, an Indonesian micro-enterprise association (UMKM) and the government-led Jakpreneur program. The value wasn’t only onboarding; it was the scaffolding around it: practical training, help navigating formal requirements, and a place to go when something in digital finance didn’t work the way it was supposed to.
Her experience is exactly the kind of real-world pathway captured in the Alliance’s ASEAN Policy Toolkit, The Trust Quotient: Unlocking Responsible Digital Payments for Micro-merchants. The toolkit argues that trust grows when digital financial services fit into the lived reality of micro-merchants, and recommends that regulators embed digital financial literacy and ongoing DFS support inside existing MSME development programs, because those programs already attract merchants and have the reach (and human touch) to help them troubleshoot problems and stick with digital payments over time.
That recommendation maps directly to the UN Principles for Responsible Digital Payments, particularly Principle 5: “Design for individuals.” The principle is blunt about a common failure: products are often built for proficient users, while everyone else is left to improvise. The goal is end-to-end experiences that work for real people, in real contexts, especially those running small businesses with thin margins and no time for preventable complexity. Mustika’s story shows what “designed for individuals” can look like in practice: not just a QR code, but the training, support, and simple reporting that make digital payments feel usable, and worth trusting.
*Mustika (a fictitious name used to protect her confidentiality)