Financial transactions via internet banking decreased last year, BOT reports
Financial transactions via internet banking in 2023 decreased by 30.7% year on year, covering 28.8 million accounts compared with 41.5 million accounts recorded in 2022, the Bank of Thailand (BOT) reported it its annual online payment statistics published on Friday.
The amount of payment via internet banking, however, increased 4.09% year on year to 33.73 billion baht via some 595,000 transactions.
Meanwhile, mobile banking enjoyed 10.9% more usage last year, covering more than 107 million accounts and some 29.55 million transactions.
Of these transactions, about 96.34 billion baht was money transfer and payments, which increased 4.7% year on year. Cash withdrawal was responsible for 1.72 billion baht of these transactions, increasing 17.3% year on year.
A financial analyst speculated that one of the reasons behind increasing cash withdrawals last year, despite the popularity of mobile banking, is that some businesses switched back to accepting only cash and refusing mobile payments via QR code scanning.
Unlike cash-only businesses, those using mobile payments are subject to more accurate taxation by the Revenue Department, the analyst said.
In its report, the BOT also said Thailand has so far integrated into cross-border QR payment systems with six other countries, namely Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. As a result, payment under this system has jumped by 475 times since 2021.
