“The challenge we are encountering is not only innovation or disruption, but includes regulatory issues that is not updated.” This is the personal viewpoint of Prinn Panitchpakdi, Country Head of CLSA Thailand, Governor of SET, Committee of NIA and Committee of ETDA, who stated on “Fintech Snapshot”. Is Thailand’s ready for disruptive technology in financial services? stage hosted by The American Chamber of Commerce and The British Chamber of Commerce in Thailand.
As a governor of The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), Prinn is looking forward to growth and changes of SET (43-year-old organization). He feels that monopoly practice of SET causes less competition and the organization itself would be disrupted by new technology like Initial Coin Offering (ICO) or other outstanding fundraising programs developed by fintech startups, especially on blockchain platform that reduces transaction delay and eliminates middleman. However, the mentioned programs are currently pending for financial regulatory approval.
“There are issues that SET should further look into the future. In my opinion, I believe that this the industry needs to be adaptive to competitions, knowledge exchange, product revolutions and new opportunities, as those will lead to private sector growth management, the settlement and the custodians. We, as the frontline, have already revolutionized and what we are expecting is the execution from the back office who are in charge of fintech regulatory governance. The greater number of restrictions have led to the more limitation, regulatory guillotine might be a solution to increase competitive advantage to business.”
Legislative Reform with Regulatory Guillotine
Refer to the information from The Office of Law Reform Commission of Thailand (OLRCT), Regulatory Guillotine initiation could be a mechanism to improve quality of Thai Laws. The project will reduce, amend and eliminate redundant regulations resulting in rapidity, transparency, scientific principles, low-cost and public participation. After the successful reform, businesses are anticipated to be able to reduce cost and uncertainties caused by regulations, and to be able to enhance competitive advantages, investment, job creation. The initiation model was adopted from Korea where their Regulatory Guillotine project took only 11 months in reforming over 11,000 regulations. The project was successful in eliminating almost 50% of redundant laws and it was expected to create a million job opportunities and increase Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to USD 36,000 million.
Additionally, another challenge Prinn is concerning is about regulatory fairness between Thai and foreign business developers/entrepreneurs, for example unfair tax issues may obstruct a path to success of Thai businesses. He suggested that it is important to establish equality in standard and regulation to expand opportunity for Thai developers to nurture. Prinn further mentioned about Thailand 4.0 National Plan that the strategy is heading in the right direction and what the government should concern is the speed of implementation to fulfill upcoming future. Although the government is driving very hard towards limitations and obstacles, there is still a mindset challenge from some group that is not align with the new policy. It may seem that the government is moving towards Thailand 0.4 rather than Thailand 4.0. However Prinn has a belief that government has the developing unit which could fully propel to reach Thailand 4.0 objective.
Lastly, the information shared in this OPEN-TEC article is partly from Prinn’s opinion that we would like to illustrate for the audience to gain a clearer idea. Still, there are more interesting points of view from this thought leader such as 1. To recognize local developers at par or even more than developers from aboard 2. To enhance fundraising flexibility for new generation developers, also to provide opportunity for those who first made a wrong move as it was just a mistake not a failure. Let’s watch more thoughts in the below video!