Fintech start-ups keen on NCB membership

Surapol Opasatien, chief executive officer of the bureau, said that with Thai fintech start-ups now playing an increasingly prominent role in the financial sector, their businesses provided an opportunity to some investors wanting a share of the profits through funding.
However, many of these investors not only will invest and be shareholders in such start-ups, but will also serve as directors in the companies, he said.
“They [the start-ups] therefore want to ensure that the investors who jointly invest in their businesses, or even become directors, are creditworthy,” he added.
Membership of the NCB is therefore essential if they are to ascertain this information about potential investors.
Furthermore, fintech start-ups want to know the creditworthiness of clients using their services because, with their business scale initially being small, they need to do everything possible to minimise risk, Surapol explained.
For the moment, however, such start-ups are unable to apply for NCB membership because the bureau has to wait for the Bank of Thailand’s regulations on the qualification of fintech businesses.
Fintech companies that can apply for NCB membership are limited at this stage to those engaged in business similar to that of a bank, and their main business must be involved with lending, he said.
Fintech operators will be a membership target for the NCB, as are nano-finance and microfinance businesses.
In regard to nano-finance, Surapol said small operators had applied for membership because most were units of leasing companies that were already members of the NCB, and could therefore use the same data base.
The NCB is also hoping to encourage large savings cooperatives – defined as those with outstanding loans of |more than Bt10 million – to become members of the bureau, the chief executive said.
“About 150 cooperatives are of this size, of which we can attract six as pilot members. We are not worrying about the small cooperatives, which use the closed system, but are focusing on cooperatives that have a bigger |scale and use the open system by borrowing funding from other sources who are not members of the cooperatives, in order to give loans to their members,” he said.
According to Bank of Thailand statistics related to household debt in the first quarter of the year, the deposit-taking corporations of savings cooperatives totalled Bt1.69 trillion, representing 12.4 per cent of gross domestic product.
Total deposit taking - corporation came in at Bt9.7 trillion, of which Bt4.75 trillion was accounted for by commercial banks, representing 34.8 per cent of GDP, followed by depository specialised financial institutions at Bt3.25 trillion, representing 23.8 per cent.