Reading Malaysian payment rails

Most payment writing on the internet assumes you are in the US, which is why it is always about Stripe Atlas and ACH and Plaid. That writing is mostly useless when you are building for the Malaysian market, where the rails have different names, different economics, and a completely different default user behaviour.

Here is what I wish someone had written when I started on JomJual.

FPX

FPX is direct bank transfer, run by PayNet. The user picks their bank, logs into online banking in a pop-up, and authorises the transfer. Think of it as iDEAL in the Netherlands, or Sofort in Germany. Settlement is T+1 in most cases. Failure modes are wholly at the bank's end: Maybank2u goes down more often than you would like.

The economics are a flat transaction fee. For businesses that gross under RM 5 million a year, this is often the cheapest rail available: you are not paying 2.5% + RM 1.00 like a credit card. You are paying ninety sen.

DuitNow

DuitNow is the umbrella for instant rails in Malaysia. Two flavours matter for e-commerce:

DuitNow Online Banking — like FPX but a little newer. Similar UX. The bank list differs slightly.

DuitNow QR — scan a merchant QR from any participating bank app. Settlement is near-instant. The UX is phone-first: a customer opens their Maybank2u app, scans, confirms. This is the rail growing fastest.

For anyone building a modern Malaysian checkout, DuitNow QR is the one to support first. The Touch'n Go eWallet app supports it. Every major bank supports it. Penetration is high.

TNG eWallet

Touch'n Go is a dominant wallet, especially for under-30 users. Integration is usually via a payment aggregator rather than direct. The customer flow is a QR scan plus a confirmation in the wallet app. Settlement is daily batch.

Support TNG eWallet if you are selling anything that skews young. Coffee, streetwear, event tickets, food deliveries.

Curlec

Curlec is Razorpay's Malaysian entity. One of the better aggregator stacks if you do not want to integrate FPX/DuitNow/TNG/cards individually. The webhook signature scheme is HMAC-SHA256 on the raw request body, compared with timingSafeEqual. The documentation is decent. The staging environment is usable.

One gotcha: the webhook sometimes arrives twice for the same payment_id. Idempotent handlers from day one.

iPay88 and Billplz

iPay88 is the old guard. Reliable. Feels a bit dated compared to Curlec but runs on institutional trust. Billplz is popular for small-business invoicing, especially for companies selling on Instagram or WhatsApp.

Which rails to support

Minimum viable checkout for a Malaysian e-commerce site:

• FPX (covers the bank-transfer majority)
• DuitNow QR (covers the phone-first majority)
• TNG eWallet (covers the young-skewing majority)

Everything else — cards, BNPL, international — is a nice-to-have once the above three convert.

The one piece of advice I give every Malaysian founder: do not default to Stripe because that is what the US YC companies use. Stripe does cards in Malaysia. Stripe does not do FPX natively. Your Malaysian checkout conversion dies the moment you send a user to a card-only page.