Thailand

As of 2020, Thailand’s internet penetration was at 76%, and growing steadily every year. Thailand’s Village Broadband Internet Project, a national internet infrastructure upgrade with the aim to cover all the villages of Thailand and allow access to government services.

In June 2022, Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act will come into force. Viewed to be comparable to the European GDPR law, it will make it obligatory that consumers give consent for their data to be stored by data processors.

Thailand is on its fourth payments roadmap, now outlining its plans for a digital payments ecosystem for 2019-2021. In 2019 Thailand launched MyPromptQR, giving mobile phone users the option to have a QR code linked to their bank accounts which merchants can scan to make payments, with the ability to be used cross-border with Singapore, Lao PDR, and Japan. This meets the international standard of ISO 20022 for security. The Bank of Thailand and other ASEAN central banks are in the process of introducing interoperable QR payments with Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia in the future

In Thailand, ID is compulsory, and they have also pursued a national digital identity platform (NDID), which is a step towards completely moving away from physical identity cards and allowing control of the flow of personal data from the consumer. Thailand also has aspirations to be a cashless society.

In 2017 PromptPay was launched. This enables users to make and receive payments into their bank accounts or into digital wallets linked to their national ID, mobile phone numbers or email addresses, As of 2019, there were nearly 50 million registrations to PromptPay.

90% of the 20,000 ICT graduates each year are unable to meet the basic qualifications for companies. With the industry needing 6,000 to 7,000 workers annually, this translates to a skills shortage of 4,000 to 5,000 a year.

Thailand ranked 78th out of 134 countries in Wiley’s Digital Skills Global Index 2021.