Funding your account with a KHQR scan

One code, every bank app

KHQR is Cambodia's single national QR-code payment standard, and the whole point of it is written into the slogan the banks use — one QR for all. A merchant displays one code, and customers of any participating bank or e-wallet can pay it from whichever app happens to be on their phone. That sounds unremarkable until you remember what came before: roughly 50 separate bank mobile apps, each running its own incompatible QR at the counter, so the code taped to the till only worked if you banked with the right institution. KHQR launched in early July 2022, and all 37 Bakong participant banks supported the format from day one. Four years on, the sticker by the register in a Phnom Penh coffee shop is one code and nobody asks which bank you use. Our deposit overview sets KHQR next to the bank-transfer and wallet routes.

KHQR is the face, Bakong is the rail

These two names get used interchangeably, and separating them makes every payment question easier to answer. KHQR is the standard you can see — the square of black pixels, the thing you point a camera at. Bakong is the settlement system underneath it: a mobile payment and banking platform initiated and operated by the National Bank of Cambodia, which combines e-wallets, mobile payments, online banking and financial apps in one interface and moves money by QR code, phone number or contact list. When you scan a KHQR code inside your own bank's app, the payment routes through Bakong whether or not you have ever heard the name. It has 63 official members plus seven institutions still integrating — ABA, ACLEDA, Wing Bank, Canadia and Sathapana among them — and it is not a central bank digital currency: around 80% of its payments are in US dollars and the balances are commercial-bank liabilities rather than central-bank ones. The consumer app arrived in 2020, built to pull the roughly 70% of the population outside the formal banking system into it. There is more on the plumbing on the Bakong page.

Dollars, not riel — the rule that decides your scan

Your BK8 balance runs in US dollars. That is structural, not a setting: our two internal codes for this market, KHUSD and KHEUR, resolve to dollars and euros, our registration config restricts the Cambodia region to a single currency, and the string KHR appears zero times in the platform configuration. There is no riel account to open. Now put that next to the rule that governs the rail: cross-currency transfers are not allowed, the transfer currency and the account currency must match, and there is no in-app FX step anywhere in the chain. KHQR itself accommodates both ប្រាក់រៀល and dollars — an ABA QR, for instance, is a single dual-currency code, and to receive on one you need two accounts, a riel one and a dollar one, with funds landing in whichever matches the currency the payer sent. So the code is bilingual about money; your account is not. Pick the USD side before you scan, and a whole category of stuck payments never happens. Cambodia already thinks this way in daily life: 83.4% of broad money was denominated in US dollars at the end of 2025.

Making the deposit, step by step

The order below matters more than the speed. Check the currency first — that is the step people skip and then spend a long time on live chat about. A Cambodian account needs a mobile number under the 855 country code and an email address, and we verify both — we do not ask for a birthdate or bank verification at sign-up, though identity checks run through Sumsub later, so have an ID card or passport photo somewhere findable. Everything else is a phone and an app you already use.

1. Open your bank app and look at which account is selected. It has to be the US dollar one — a riel account cannot fund a dollar destination and nothing in the chain converts for you.
2. Sign in at BK8 and open the cashier. A new account wants a mobile number on 855, an email, a username and a password.
3. Choose the deposit method. We configure three bank codes for Cambodian dollar deposits — ABA, ACLEDA and Maybank — and the cashier shows you what that method needs, whether that is a code to scan or an account to send to.
4. If you are given a code, scan it from inside your own banking app rather than from a general camera app, so the payment stays on the Bakong rail and inside a screen that already knows who you are.
5. Check the amount and the currency on the confirmation screen before you approve. On a static code you type the figure yourself, which is where mistakes live.
6. Approve with your app's PIN or biometric, then wait for the push notification. That notification is your receipt and the first thing support will ask you for.
7. Open the cashier — and if this is the first deposit on the account, the +1500% match and 250 free spins attach to it and to nothing afterwards.

Static and dynamic codes, and why the amount is sometimes pre-filled

There are two kinds of KHQR and the difference is visible the moment you scan. The National Bank of Cambodia's KHQR Guideline, published in November 2020, defines a static code with Point of Initiation Method 010211 and a dynamic one with 010212. A static code is printed once and reused forever: it identifies the recipient but carries no amount, so your app asks you to type the figure. A dynamic code is generated for one payment, usually on a screen, and arrives with the amount already inside it — you confirm rather than compose. For a deposit, dynamic is the safer of the two: nothing to mistype, and the sum on your confirmation screen is the sum the recipient expects. The guideline is also a merchant-presented specification — the merchant shows, the customer scans — and it does not cover consumer-presented QR, where a cashier scans a code off your phone instead. That pattern does exist here, at agent counters rather than in the NBC spec — more on it below.

Limits and fees that apply to a scan

Two things before the table. First, there is no cap on the number of Bakong transfers you can make in a day — the amount ceilings are set by each member bank individually, not by the National Bank of Cambodia, which is why the numbers differ by app. Second, the tight limits people quote usually belong to the NBC's own Bakong wallet, a separate object from your bank account, capped at a 2,500 USD balance. Ordinary deposits sit nowhere near any of this.

Notice what is absent: a fee charged by us. Every figure above is a bank's own published schedule, and the two differ enough to be worth checking before a large transfer — the ABA page and the ACLEDA page carry the full bands. Withdrawals travel the same kind of rail in reverse, so the dollar account you scan from is the one to keep tidy.

When the money is still cash in your hand

A great deal of income in this country is physical, and KHQR handles that better than most expect — this is where the consumer-presented pattern appears. At a TrueMoney agent you show a code from any Bakong member app and the agent scans it; that single gesture covers cash-in and cash-out for accounts at over 60 Bakong member financial institutions, not just TrueMoney wallets, at 10,000 agents nationwide, in riel or dollars. You walk away with a paper receipt and a push notification in your banking app. Wing runs the same idea from the other direction: open the Wing Bank App, tap QR Scan, scan the code at any agent labelled Bakong Cash-Out, and take the cash — free, no minimum, from 2,000 riel upward, across more than 12,000 agents. Riel notes in use run from 100 to 50,000 and there are no coins, which is why riel does the sub-dollar change — a habit reinforced since June 2020, when the National Bank began pulling $1, $2 and $5 notes out of domestic circulation without making them illegal tender. Get the dollars into an account, then scan.

• TrueMoney: 10,000 agents nationwide, cash in or out for accounts at over 60 Bakong member institutions, in riel or dollars, by scanning your KHQR.
• Wing: more than 12,000 agents, free cash-out with no fee and no minimum, at any counter labelled Bakong Cash-Out.
• A TrueMoney wallet itself loads by Bakong KHQR from any bank, wallet-to-wallet, TrueCode, agent, or cash over the counter at any 7-Eleven — see the TrueMoney page.
• Registering for Bakong needs a National ID card or passport plus a local phone number, and only individual savings or current accounts qualify — joint and fixed-deposit accounts cannot register.

What KHQR does not cover

KHQR travels further than it used to, but not everywhere. Outbound, the National Bank has launched cross-border QR with Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia and South Korea, plus UnionPay and Alipay+; from ABA Mobile those payments require you to hold a riel account and are debited in riel, free of charge. Inbound, since 14 October 2024 users of more than ten international payment apps in the Alipay+ network — Alipay in China, Touch 'n Go in Malaysia, Kakao Pay in Korea, OCBC in Singapore — can scan KHQR codes to pay here. What does not exist is general worldwide KHQR acceptance, and these corridors are built for a person paying a merchant, not for every kind of transfer.

Inside Cambodia, none of that matters: the code in your bank app works, the money lands in dollars, and the lobby opens. Our leaderboard splits play into seven categories — Slots, Bingo, Casino, ESportsbook, Sports, Fishing and Lottery — a fair map of where a first session goes. For the record: the platform is operated by Mettlemind Tech Ltd, registration number 15779, licensed by the Government of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan under ALSI-202504032-FI2, and our official Cambodian domain is bk8khr.com — worth one glance at the address bar before any password goes anywhere. When the dollar account is selected, fund the account and the +1500% welcome match with 250 free spins is waiting on that first deposit.

Questions Cambodian players actually ask

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