Blog · Payments
117 million QR payments in one month in Argentina: now every one of them has to reconcile with the bank
According to the BCRA (Argentina's central bank), 117.2 million interoperable QR payments were made in August 2026, 67.5% more than a year earlier, for a total of ARS 2.9 trillion. Collecting the money is the easy part. Making every peso reconcile with the bank at the end of the day is what separates a healthy operation from an accounting problem.
What the report says
The BCRA's August Retail Payments Report (Informe de Pagos Minoristas) records 118.3 million transfer payments, and 99.1% of them were initiated with a QR code. The value of QR payments grew 62.9% year over year in real terms. Doing the math, the average payment is around ARS 24,700: lots of small payments.
The money comes almost equally from bank accounts (52.7%, via CBU, Argentina's standard bank account number) and from wallets (47.3%, via CVU, a virtual account number in Argentina's payment system). On the merchant side, 53.8% was credited to payment accounts and 46.2% to bank accounts. There are 92 interoperable wallets and 67 registered acceptors. Meanwhile, in July, debit card payments fell 8.4% and credit card payments 9.2% by number of transactions.
Why reconciliation gets hard
With cards, the merchant receives a batched settlement from the acquirer. With QR, each payment is a transfer that arrives on its own, from any of dozens of wallets or banks, and sometimes into more than one account belonging to the same merchant. You have to match each credit with its sale and catch the one that arrived twice, the one that arrived late, and the one that never arrived.
With a few payments a day, a spreadsheet can handle it. With thousands, the spreadsheet falls behind and discrepancies pile up until the month-end close, when nobody remembers what happened. The work moves from the counter to the system: unique references, idempotent notifications, and an automated daily match.