Connecting Thailand: The Journey of a Payment Revolution

Over the past few years, many crucial developments have taken place in the Thai payments landscape to keep pace with new technology and customers’ needs. In particular, the enhancements to the country’s payment systems infrastructure have broadened public access to financial services with more efficiency and lower cost. These are key contributors to a more than 40 percent growth in e-Payment transactions in 2018 compared to the previous year.

The Bank of Thailand’s (BOT) significant infrastructure payment enhancements include:

1. PromptPay: This real-time retail fund transfer system has enabled faster and more convenient instant payments, providing funds transfer among individuals, businesses, and government agencies by using easy-to-remember IDs (i.e. citizen ID, mobile phone numbers, corporate ID, or e-Wallet ID) as proxies of traditional bank account numbers. This open infrastructure was initially launched in late 2016 to serve for government welfare disbursement and was gradually extended to facilitate funds transfer services between individuals and juristic persons, and also other overlay services such as e-Donation, cross-bank bill payment, and PayAlert.
   
   PromptPay has gained popularity over time, given that 48.2 million IDs have been registered in the system (as of May 2019). The daily average volume was 5.3 million transactions and daily average value reached 28.2 billion THB in the first quarter of this year.
2. Interoperable QR Code for Payments: The development of an interoperable QR Code for payments creates interoperability among banks and non-bank payment service providers. The adoption of the interoperable QR Code for payments, known as Thai QR Payment, has allowed merchants .... Read more in the CBPN Members' Library with your annual subscription

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