The inclusive effects and evolutionary path of payment infrastructure: an analysis of Cambodia's Bakong–KHQR system

In October 2020, the National Bank of Cambodia launched Bakong, a retail payment system, followed by the introduction of KHQR, a unified national QR code standard, in 2022. By the end of 2024, the system had reached 30 million registered users and 4.5 million merchant acceptance points. In 2025, it processed 1.326 billion transactions, of which 771 million were denominated in the local currency, the Cambodian riel, surpassing US dollar-denominated transactions for the first time. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying the inclusive effects of payment infrastructure and its evolutionary path, dividing the transmission process into four layers: access, scale, data, and denomination. At the access layer, the key change is that credit assessment shifts from being a prerequisite for account opening to becoming an outcome of account usage. At the scale layer, a unified QR code standard and clearing neutrality jointly enable the system to overcome the critical-mass threshold characteristic of two-sided markets. At the data layer, progress remains constrained by three complementary institutional arrangements: data ownership, credit reporting coverage, and risk-based pricing. At the denomination layer, reduced transaction frictions in retail payments marginally alter the inertia of domestic currency use. On this basis, the paper proposes an evolutionary path progressing from the clearing layer to the standards layer, the use-case layer, and finally the credit layer. It also discusses four boundary conditions: coverage does not necessarily translate into usage, fraud risks, the costs of cross-border interoperability, and the limits of retail-level de-dollarization.