The retail payments landscape has always been ripe for disruption and innovation not just because of evolving consumer behaviour but also due to regulatory reforms, and governments’ agenda on financial inclusion and digital payment. This is particularly prevalent in emerging markets wherein there is a large unbanked population and a high mobile penetration rate.

For instance, Thailand’s government and central bank have been promoting a nationwide digital economy through its National E-payment Master Plan (NEMP) since 2014. In a move to transform the country into a cashless economy, PromptPay was rolled out in 2017 as an interbank mobile payment system leveraging national ID and mobile phones. The government also launched a national programme to drive point of sale (POS) installation while the central bank introduced a quick response (QR) code payment standard to foster an interoperable payments infrastructure.

Banks in Thailand have developed their respective digital strategies and have been building infrastructures to support the nationwide transformation to e-payments. Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) is among those that support the digital movement. The bank is one of Thailand’s oldest and largest banks by assets, loans and deposits. Aiming to become the country’s leading transaction bank, SCB embarked on a journey to develop a modern digital payment system that is aligned and part of the NEMP roadmap.

The need to optimise operations and payment solutions

The bank implemented a future-proof real-time payments platform and identified key business issues to be addressed, namely limited system capacity for supporting customers’ real-time transactions and the bank’s workload expansion, time to market new initiatives and products, and cost-efficiency.

“The main goal of developing a payment hub is to drive innovative payments via application programming interface (API). Once we have an available platf...

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Keywords:E-payments, Digital Payments, Mobile Banking, Digitalisation, Financial Inclusion, Cashless