Tencent Holdings, China's largest gaming and social media company, is considering launching WeChat Pay, a digital payments platform service, in Thailand.
Royal Chen, vice-president for financial technology at Tencent Holdings, said Tencent is planning to partner with certain Thai businesses, particularly banks, to provide the service because payments need to be localised in different countries.
"A good local partner is important. If we launch WeChat Pay in Thailand we will work with a local partner," Mr Chen said during an interview with the Bangkok Post in Hangzhou.
The firm has no timeline to launch WeChat Pay in Thailand yet, he said.
Mr Chen said Thailand is a key market for WeChat Pay expansion because it has a large number of users of Tencent's popular social network WeChat and is a major destination for Chinese tourists.
"We already have local merchants in Thailand who accept WeChat Pay from Chinese tourists," he said.
China remains the largest contributor in terms of both arrivals and tourism revenue to Thailand. Chinese tourists spend more on average than other tourists, above 5,000 baht per person a day, according to data from the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
Chinese accounted for nearly one-third of last year's record 35 million arrivals, but the number began to fall in August this year, plunging almost 12% from a year earlier after a July boat accident killed more than 40 Chinese tourists in Phuket.
WeChat Pay has about 800 million active monthly users, most of them Chinese nationals, Tencent said. The payment feature integrated into the WeChat app is supported by merchants in over 40 countries, including Thailand.
In August this year, WeChat launched payment features called WeChat Pay My in Malaysia, the first market in Asia for the service outside of mainland China and Hong Kong.
The Malaysian payment feature will enable local businesses to engage with their customers under the same platform and make or transfer payments in ringgit.
"The outcome is beyond our expectations, and we are expecting the digital wallet in Malaysia to grow faster than in others and even faster than in Hong Kong," Mr Chen said.
Tencent launched WeChat Pay HK in Hong Kong in 2016, with transaction growth up more than tenfold last year.
Tencent's key products and services in Thailand include Sanook.com, which has 30 million active monthly users; Joox, the largest music-streaming platform in Thailand, with 22 million users; and mobile games such as PubG, Ultimate Legends, Ultimate Racing, and Kingdom Craft.