One of Thailand’s biggest banks plans to create a new payment hub centered on Ripple’s blockchain technology.
Siam Commercial Bank (SBC) has a main remittance corridor between Thailand and Japan that’s powered by a partnership with Ripple and banking giant SBI.
SCB’s partnership with Ripple began in 2016, and the company’s chief technology officer Colin Dinn says he now believes banks that don’t implement similar technology are facing extinction.
“Why did we look at Ripple? Because we saw that it has a customer-centric capability. It was giving customers what they wanted, not what we as a bank wanted to push.
With Ripple, we found a way and a partner that could actually work with us in a very different way… We have got aggressive ambition. We want to do things differently. We want to really change. We don’t see a bank being relevant to its customers in the next five to eight years. In fact, my personal view – not the bank – but my personal view is it’s going to be very hard for a bank to exist in five to eight years. There will be a product behind some other brand.
And so, what we have been doing working within our management team, is we’re looking at how we’re going to make ourselves relevant. And that means we’ve got to be aggressive, really push the envelope on what’s possible and then define the next step beyond. So we needed a company that can work with us in that kind of model, that we can grow aggressively with.”
According to Dinn, Ripple’s technology is allowing Siam Commercial Bank to plan for a major expansion across the region.
“We’ve worked out that we want to actually change the way we operate. So we’re looking at now setting up a regional hub. We’ve got a corridor to Japan. We will build, and we’ve talked to some partners today and yesterday about building more corridors.
So the principle of the corridor is always there and that’s paramount. What we’re also doing, because we have our own network within the region, we’re looking at how we actually start to build that out and start to be able to offer payment capability not just into Thailand. Not just remittances – they will go beyond that. But the point is, we’re going to offer this across the whole region. We’re going to build a hub. We’re looking to partner with other organizations so we can evolve and be able to create a whole new ecosystem around the technologies that we’ve actually built.”
Siam Commercial Bank was founded more than 100 years ago and is now the third largest in Thailand.