Banks launched a digital bank statement (dStatement) service on Monday to offer greater convenience to customers.
The initiative is a collaboration between the Bank of Thailand (BoT), 11 financial institutions under the Thai Bankers' Association (TBA) and Government Financial Institutions Association (GFA).
The service is a financial information exchange for sending and receiving bank statement data directly between banks in a machine-readable digital format.
The service allows customers who need to submit bank statements as supporting documents to request and send their bank statement data directly from one bank to another using their own mobile banking apps or via other channels.
Initially the service will be provided by six banks and five more banks will offer the service at a later date during the first half of this year.
Ronadol Numnonda, BoT deputy governor for financial institutions stability, said the dStatement service is significantly more efficient than the traditional version.
With the digital service, customers do not need to go to a physical branch to ask for a paper-based bank statement, so it provides more convenience, speed, security and lower costs for both banks and customers, he added.
The ceiling fee charge for the dStatement service is set at 75 baht per account, compared with 100-200 for the existing paper-based bank statement, depending on the financial institution and the duration of the requested paper bank statement.
The central bank expects around 500,000 to 1 million loan applications, accounting for 5-8% of total loan applications in 2021, to ask for the dStatement in the first year of the service.
According to this forecast, the overall banking system could save 250-500 million baht in operating costs compared with paper-based bank statement transactions.
If demand increases to 50% of total loan applications, it would save 2.5-3 billion baht in operating costs.
The market mechanism and competition among financial institutions is expected to bring down the fee charge for this new financial service.
"The dStatement is the first milestone of an open data ecosystem and it will establish a solid foundation for the Thai financial sector's transformation from a traditional channel to a digital platform in line with the digital era," Mr Ronadol said.
The dStatement will allow low-income earners to access financial sources better.
At the same time, the BoT and financial institutions will also promote consumers' financial literacy, especially in data privacy for the digital financial service.
In addition, Mr Ronadol said the BoT plans to expand dStatment to cover other services, from non-banks, non-financial services and corporate companies, to the use in the government sector. For instance, the dStatement can be expanded to cover a visa application.