Thailand's fintech moment
Open banking could lead to the kind of independence and scale that has eluded most Thai fintech companies.
Last week, mid-April, the payments and fintech conference group Money20/20 staged its annual Asia leg, in Bangkok. This was the organizer’s third year there, and Thai banks mostly ignored it: Kasikornbank was a minor sponsor, but Bangkok Bank, Siam Commercial Bank, Krung Thai Bank, and other lenders were a no-show.
This is more a loss for Thai banks than for Money20/20. It’s a testament to the inward focus of Thailand’s financial institutions, which has hampered the flourishing of Thailand’s fintech industry. Might change be coming?
Any national bank should be focused on its domestic business. But Thailand is part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose members continue to build infrastructure to connect their financial systems. Its central bank was a member of mBridge, a BIS-blessed platform for exchanging central-bank digital currencies, with China, Hong Kong, and the UAE. More than 1 million Thais work abroad, remitting money home. Bangkok is a travel hub between Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.
Having a global finance and fintech conference hosted in Thailand’s capital would have given local banks exposure to new ideas and companies. Event fees weren’t an issue: the top banks are highly profitable, and the conference was discounted compared to its US and European sleeves.
The snub was because Thai banks feel comfortably ensconced. They have been good at fending off startup competition. Although they have their own digital agendas and venture investment arms, local banks deploy these to ring-fence the status quo: the imminent launch of three digital-only banks is another iteration of that strategy. The presence of many stablecoin-related companies at Money20/20 was not a draw; possibly the opposite.
Although Thailand’s leading banks are adept at serving retail customers, they continue to mostly ignore SMEs. They are weak at cross-border business. These gaps have not overly bothered the banks. But the possible arrival of open-banking frameworks could shake things up, by making SMEs and their cross-border payments needs a meaningful opportunity for startups and new entrants.
Fintech false dawn
Thailand’s fintech sector no longer looks like the easy growth story it once promised.
Its history goes back to 2003, with the launch of TrueMoney, later restructured as Ascend Group, which runs the country’s leading mobile wallet; and of 2C2P, an online payment provider that later moved to Singapore (and has since been acquired).
The mid-2010s made fintech a trend, with the debut of companies including payment gateway Omise (today, Opn), cross-border payments player DeeMoney, wealthtechs Finnomena and Robowealth, and insurtech Roojai.
They are the survivors of a wave that included dozens of startups. Indeed, today the country claims up to 177 active fintechs (depending on who’s counting), led by payments and alternative lending. But those numbers are surely misleading.
“Eighty percent of Thai fintechs are zombies,” said Kris Supavatanakul, strategy director at Finnomena and a former corporate VC at Siam Commercial Bank.
One reason is the loss of venture-capital funding, a global trend. At the height of the zero-interest-rate funding boom, in 2021, Thai fintech firms raised $216 million. That number obscures the fact that most of it involved Ascend Money’s monster $105 million Series C round. Fintech funding has fallen off a cliff since, both in Thailand and across Southeast Asia.
Bank dependent
There are more fundamental challenges to Thai fintech. In most areas of finance, fintechs depend on commercial banks for infrastructure, technology, and distribution.
Payment infrastructure is monopolized by National ITMX Company, established by the Thai Bankers’ Association under the direction of the Bank of Thailand’s payments division. ITMX is responsible for developing and maintaining the electronic payment infrastructure, including mobile, internet, ATM, and other rails, such as the QR system PromptPay.
“The national switch serves the banks,” said Aswin Phlaphongphanich, co-founder and CEO of DeeMoney. “That means fintechs can’t be agnostic. We don’t have technological independence, which means we don’t have commercial independence.”
The problem for fintechs is simple. The industry is almost entirely focused on retail customers. To serve them requires using ITMX’s switch, operated by the commercial banks (at arm’s length). In theory, a fintech could build its own payments infrastructure. But four banks control more than 80 percent of retail deposits. They are also on top of digital offerings.
Things get even more complicated for fintechs. The majority choose to simply serve banking partners with user-interface design, KYC services, or other operational services. But if a fintech wants to touch customer money – to collect, disburse, or settle – they are locked out. They can participate on ITMX rails if they are licensed, but these are hard to get. Nor are all licenses equal: often, licenses granted to fintechs are restricted, and come with the sort of red tape that big banks can absorb but that startups cannot.
Finally, in the mid-2010s, banks began eliminating fees on mobile payments, back when few people saw these taking off in Thailand; today, mobile wallets are a big business – for retail users. They don’t make any money for fintechs, and banks absorb the cost into deposit businesses.
Local heroes
There are, of course, fintech success stories in Thailand. They involve companies that have found a way to avoid relying on banks for moving money or access to users.
Ascend Money is owned by CP Group, a massive conglomerate whose empire includes the domestic 7-11 franchise. The fintech has more than 20 million users and it can charge a fee for facilitating consumer purchases from its retail affiliates.
Finnomena has built its own brokerage business to sell mutual funds. It continues to build this out, and is seeking a full brokerage license, so it can also execute orders for individual stocks and bonds. But it does not use a bank channel for acquiring customers.
DeeMoney has found a niche in cross-border payments, because Thai banks ignore this space. Omise specializes in online payments for businesses in the digital economy, because banks ignore SMEs.
A few foreign fintechs have also succeeded in Thailand.
Funding Societies, based in Singapore, has become the biggest fintech lender to SMEs. It entered in 2021 as one of the first fintechs to receive a debt crowdfunding license from the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission. Funding Societies already had a thriving business in regional markets, matching SME borrowers and investors looking for yield. Its story shows what happens when a competent company that spends years on obtaining a license is able to serve credit-starved SMEs.
Singapore-based insurtech Igloo has announced a joint venture with local telco JMT Network Services to launch Thailand’s first fully digital insurer. Early days!
Wise Platform is about to launch in Thailand. After many years of assiduous courting, in March the remittance platform secured five licenses (for payments, electronic money, and FX) from Bank of Thailand and the Ministry of Commerce. This makes Wise the first non-bank in the country to be fully licensed to issue foreign-currency wallets and cards. But the licensing was only one part of London-based Wise’s breakthrough. Its global remittance business relies on having a bank account in the local market, from which it transfers customer debits and credits. One of the Thai commercial banks broke ranks and has agreed to provide a deposit account to Wise; its identity has not been announced.
Enter the virtual banks
One factor that could explain this class betrayal is the advent of three licensed digital banks, which are slated to go live this summer. These consortia are more likely to cannibalize the commercial-banking market than innovate any new products or services.
Two of them are partly owned by big local banks. Siam Commercial Bank is partnered with South Korea’s KakaoBank and China’s WeBank. Krungthai Bank has a more domestic consortium, with telco AIS and PTT Oil & Retail. The third group includes CP Group’s Ascend Money.
These three virtual banks are all focused on the retail population. They bring capital, data, and distribution. They do not include disrupters or banks with wholesale arms. There is no equivalent to, say, Grab’s leading position in Singapore’s retail digital bank, GBX, or an e-commerce outsider like Shopee (a stakeholder in Mari Bank).
Indeed, a look at Singapore shows that its retail-focused digital banks face major obstacles to growth. The population is already banked. Trust Bank (backed by Standard Chartered) has a huge retail footprint, thanks to its shareholder, NTUC, but it can’t make a profit. The two wholesale players, ANEXT Bank (Ant Group) and Green Link Digital Bank focus on SME trade and supply-chain finance, and are flourishing.
There doesn’t appear to be an equivalent story among Thailand’s new trio of digital banks. The consortia appear designed to protect incumbents, not to unleash new categories of competition.
This could bring risks to the banking industry. Thailand’s population is fully banked. It’s so well banked, that it also has a huge household debt problem. With a debt-to-income ratio of 88 percent (as of Q3 2025), Thailand’s consumers are the most indebted in ASEAN. Virtual banks tend to make headway by offering higher interest on deposits combined with slick user interfaces. What’s likely to happen is a huge refinancing of debt, which will move the problem out of traditional banks and onto the books of the three virtual banks. This is a recipe for rising non-performing loans, which will eat their capital base, obstructing rather than enabling them to innovate with fintech partners.
Although the three new banks could provide some new distribution or offer infrastructure, they are unlikely to help Thailand’s fintech industry to grow. Most fintechs focus on retail, for payments, wallets, lending, and investing. As we’ve seen, only a handful of them control their own destiny by avoiding depending on banks for distribution, tech, and licensing. As a class, it is hard to see Thai fintech scaling beyond the nation’s borders.
Open doors
The key to creating new opportunity for fintechs is not virtual banks, but open banking.
And there is good news on this front. The Bank of Thailand has declared an open data framework gives customers the right to port data across deposits, loans and payment services through secure and standardized digital channels. This is meant to phase in at the end of 2026, initially for individual deposit data. Later, business data and other categories are meant to go live.
If implemented seriously, the BoT’s policy would begin to loosen one of the deepest constraints in Thai fintech: dependence on banks not only for settlement, but also for customer data, onboarding pathways, and product distribution.
The promise is clearest in lending and SME services. Open banking could allow fintechs to refinance debt, consolidate deposits and build better borrowing journeys once data and rails are truly accessible. The Bank of Thailand has also explicitly tied digital finance policy to household and SME financial inclusion, while acknowledging that SME access to credit remains structurally weak.
But policy intent is not the same as implementation. Thailand’s open banking push could still devolve into a compliance exercise if APIs are technically available but commercially weak, or if major banks delay, limit or shape access in ways that protect their franchise. The framework only changes the market if a few big banks actually lead, rather than stall. Given how concentrated Thai banking remains, skepticism is warranted.
The SME opportunity
The strongest argument for a second wind in Thai fintech is not another retail super-app. It is SMEs. SMEs account for nearly all Thai enterprises, yet only about half of them can access formal credit from banks or specialized financial institutions, and SME loan growth has been weak or negative.
Existing fintechs and banks alike still skew toward consumer products because retail is easier to score, market and distribute at scale. With open banking, the incentives to tackle SMEs become too great to ignore. A few fintechs such as DeeMoney already operate an API-based platform for global remittance companies such as Western Union and Remitly to disburse funds into Thailand without touching a commercial bank branch.
There are plenty of new business ideas: collecting baht for multinationals who want to repatriate money home; stablecoin settlements; global QR-based settlements. These don’t require a bank partner, but they do require a license or regulatory green lights. Open banking would make it hard for regulators to say no.
Thai fintechs are most competitive when they solve coordination problems that banks don’t prioritize: cross-border remittances, SME collections, overseas e-commerce settlement, regional treasury flows, fragmented ASEAN payment corridors. (The exception is Bangkok Bank, the biggest Thai lender, which also operates more than 30 branches overseas, mostly in Southeast Asia and China, and a controlling stake in Indonesia’s PermataBank. About 25 percent of its loan book is sourced internationally.)
Thailand’s domestic economy is not large enough to support endless new consumer-fintech clones, but Thailand as a node in ASEAN trade, labor mobility and cross-border commerce is much more promising. That is particularly true for SMEs that import, export, sell online or rely on regional supplier networks yet still struggle with FX pricing, slow settlement, poor visibility and bank-centric onboarding.
Because licensing is so slow and painful for fintechs, they need a bank shareholder or partner to survive. Open banking as real infrastructure, not a regulatory slogan, would pave the way for standardized APIs and consent frameworks. This would pressure banks to make data and payments usable for third parties. It would create incentives to allow fintechs and banks to pivot toward SME pain points. And it would put pressure on regulators to create licenses that allow non-banks to scale on their own.
Cross-border and SME services are where innovation is needed, and can happen. It’s notable, therefore, that a leading global conference that’s all about financial connectivity and has taken place in Bangkok for three years is shunned by Thai banks. It’s not a conversation they want to have.