Thailand's banking service is one of the most innovative sectors in Asean for coping with disruptive technology, in which micropayments, data monetisation and agile development are growing trends in 2019, says IDC Financial Insights.
Thailand's financial service sector, including retail banking, payment and insurance, is innovative, outperforming Malaysia, Indonesia and even Taiwan, said Cyrus Daruwaia, managing director of IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific.
Speaking at the Asian Financial Services Congress 2019 under the theme "Humanly Possible" in Singapore recently, he said executives of leading banks and insurance firms in Thailand are tech-savvy and realise the role of data utilisation to monetise large customers and open them up for cross-collaboration with leading startups and retail companies.
Mr Daruwaia said this year, IDC expects to see micropayments such as e-wallets gain momentum among users who have no bank accounts, with data monetisation continuing to grow.
Adoption of agile development will increase and accelerate new applications and services, he said.
The Bank of Thailand has encouraged an open policy for using cloud computing that allows banks to explore and adopt new technologies that accelerate speed of innovation.
Michael Araneta, associate vice-president and head of IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific, said Thais are open to giving real data to businesses in exchange for special privileges such as better services, incentives, or more convenience.
Thai policymakers also encourage the national digital identity scheme to broaden revenue opportunities for banks, called "identity as a service".
Citing the Digital Trust Index, a study by IDC during 2017-18 that had 3,200 respondents in 10 Asia-Pacific countries, including 400 from Thailand, Mr Araneta said 54% of Thai respondents expect digital identity will be a real digital version of their physical identity, higher than the regional average of 32.6%.
Mr Araneta said banks need to be more innovative by having more partners in fintech.
Three key success factors that banks need to achieve are payment, analytics and product and marketing fit. In the era of automation, banks need to use customer insight to have them stick to their services.
He predicts Thailand financial services will have open banking and artificial intelligence (AI) to process transactions initiated by third-party digital personal assistants.
In addition, banks will open the Application Programming Interface (API) to connect with third-party partners such as fintech startups, and will continuously replace chatbots.
