GSB president Chatchai Payuhanaveechai told the media recently that the state bank was putting more focus on online service and upgrading its essential infrastructure to respond to increasing demand from the markets. This is in line with an ongoing effort both from the government and private bankers to develop their IT system to accommodate Any ID money transfers.

Despite accounting for a smaller portion compared to other sources of revenue, debit/credit card and electronic service continues to grow. In the first three months, this service made about Bt1.129 billion while the largest amounts were from loans at Bt14.041 billion. In the first quarter, after transferring about Bt800 million of total revenue to the Specialised Financial Institution Development Fund, GSB posted a net profit of Bt1.656 billion.

Chatchai added that the GSB was seeing in an increase in debit and credit card use, ATM, mobile banking and Internet banking. As of last month, debit and ATM cardholders were approximately 5.33 million, increasing from 5.2 million last year. Credit-card holders were almost 11,000 after being launched on April 1.

Under MyMo by GSB-mobile banking, there were about 540,553 users now, up from 352,107 last year while Internet banking users were 136,869, increasing from 52,054 last year.

“We believe that by end of this year, MyMo users will reach more than 1 million and Internet banking users will be exceeded 300,000,” Chatchai stressed.

In line with this customer expansion, GSB, as a state bank, also wants to play a key part in supporting the establishment of a national electronic or e-payment money system with a registered identification (ID) or mobile phone number as a reference.

The GSB president said that the bank aims to complete the installation of 2 million electronic data capture (EDC) machines at all 1,100 branches nationwide by the end of this year, on top of about 400,000 now.

“We hope that those deployed EDC machines would be a key platform for online money transactions across the Kingdom and make a cashless society a reality soon as well as help increase the number of debit and credit card users in the near future,” he added.

According to the government’s subcommittee on national e-payment, more than 90 per cent of all transactions in the Kingdom were still conducted in cash. However, e-payments and e-commerce are benefiting from an expansion of the 4G wireless Internet broadband in the country.