Thai Credit Retail Bank (TCRB) expects to take about one year to upgrade to become a commercial bank and plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of this year.
According to the bank's chief executive Winyou Chaiyawan, the Finance Ministry in September 2022 agreed on the bank's business plan to upgrade to a commercial bank from its existing retail banking position.
The regulator would take about one year to supervise the bank's business plan preparation, he said.
The bank has also filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission its plan to offer around 347 million IPO shares on the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Proceeds raised from the IPO would be used for business expansion, IT and digital infrastructure development.
Mr Winyou said the bank would maintain existing business strategies focusing mainly on nanofinance and microfinance businesses for the underserved customer segment.
TCRB's business has continued to grow for the 16 years of its operation, but the bank cannot expand to some business areas such as corporate banking because of limitations on existing retail banking licences.
The bank launched a digital financial service via Micro-Pay e-Wallet -- an e-wallet platform -- in 2019 which now has 318,378 users. The users largely use it for loan withdrawals, debt instalments and payments, which respond to the bank's customer segment.
"We plan to upgrade the e-wallet to a mobile banking platform in accordance with the upgrade to a commercial bank and offer wider financial services including deposits," he said.
Separately, the bank's managing director Roy Agustinus Gunara said TCRB is the industry's fastest-growing bank partly due to the small base factor. For the past five years, the bank's total loans grew by almost three times from 45 billion baht's worth of total loans outstanding in 2018 to 121 billion baht in 2022.
The bank showed a strong return on average equity at 18.9% last year. The bank booked a net profit of 2.35 million baht in 2022, rising from 1.93 billion baht in 2021 and from 771 million baht in 2018.
The bank has around 500 low-cost branches nationwide and a lower cost-to-income ratio of 39.5% in 2022 compared with 42.3% in 2021 and 49.9% in 2020. Currently, the bank has 3,650 employees. The mixed channel of human and online services is the bank's key strategy for expanding its business and customer base.
According to the bank's survey, there are a total of 3.17 million small and medium-sized enterprises, of which 43,191 are medium enterprises, 421,588 small and 2.17 million micro-enterprises.
Micro-enterprises, which are business owners or individuals with less than 1.8 million baht in annual revenue or having fewer than five employees in total, are the bank's market segment, Mr Gunara said.
