THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
nationthailand

Visa to increase card acceptance points upcountry

Visa to increase card acceptance points upcountry

To support Thailand's National E-Payment Project and drive payment growth next year, Visa Thailand will add more than 1,000 acceptance points for plastic cards upcountry, especially in Tier 2 provinces in the Northeast.

Visa to increase card acceptance points upcountry

Country manager Suripong Tantiyanon said yesterday that the company was responding to the policy from the Bank of Thailand on expanding acceptance points at key merchants and promoting mobile points of sale at smaller merchants to boost electronic payments.

Visa has about 400,000 acceptance points nationwide. Bangkok still dominates the country’s plastic-card spending at 64 per cent. The company hopes payments between Greater Bangkok and the provinces will be more balanced soon.

In its 2015 fiscal year, which ended on September 30, payment volume expanded by 11.5 per cent against 9.6 per cent in 2014. Transactions turned to growth of 7.7 per cent from a drop of 3 per cent.

The company hopes its performance for fiscal 2016 will better because besides the expansion of acceptance points, the company is focusing on tourism, both outbound and inbound.

Visa Thailand and the Tourism Authority of Thailand are jointly running campaigns to encourage Chinese tourists to shop till they drop.

Visa will work more closely with Chinese banks to offer privileges to their cardholders for shopping at luxury malls in Thailand.

It will run the same campaigns for merchants in Japan to encourage shopping by Thai visitors there, Suripong said.

According to VisaNet Top 5 F2F Corridors, conducted from June 2014-June 2015, Japan ranked third in the outbound market with payment growth of 22 per cent.

Chinese tourists are surpassing Russians to become the fifth-largest market, so co-marketing with Chinese banks is a key|strategy for Visa Thailand in fiscal 2016.

In fiscal 2015, spending of outbound tourists increased by 16.3 per cent from 7.2 per cent.

According to the Visa Consumer Payment Attitude Study 2015, Thais are carrying less cash than they did in the past five years five years ago because of higher card and e-commerce usage.

About 52 per cent of the respondents said they preferred to pay by card than by cash, while 57 per cent said carrying cash was not safe.

The average cash that Thais carry in their wallets has fallen to Bt2,094 this year from Bt2,426 last year.

Suripong said e-commerce |in Thailand was still in the nascent stage but growth was rapid. Fashion and accessories purchases and bill payments will become key growth drivers, as well as transactions made via smartphones.

About 68 per cent of the respondents said they were comfortable with relying on biometrics such as fingerprints and face recognition for payment authentication.

One in eight said they were interested in contactless payments by wearables and mobile phones.

The technology has already been widely adopted by Thai |\\consumers, so the trend of electronic payment in the country still has room to grow, Suripong said.

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