Co-Founder's Vision: Leading Thailand's Cashless Movement

Cashless Society Trends Driving Thailand’s Economy

Thailand has entered a new era of digital payments. Since the inception of first e-payment options such as the credit card, and to the mass-adoption of QR PromptPay to date. The majority of Thais have adopted these payment options by storm. In fact, Thailand has the largest percentage of mobile banking users in the world, a staggering 97% of internet users (“Thailand leads southeast Asia”, 2024).

Digital adoption is now deep-rooted in Thailand’s economy, reflected through our daily lives, from buying groceries to managing real estate transactions, so these instances have mostly been made through digital transactions. As the new generation of people tend to shift payment behavior towards e-payment, including the middle income, they also prioritize digital payment as their preferred method. To illustrate, large-scale enterprises in the food industry, such as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme, no longer accept cash; these brands now operate with 100% cashless payment methods.

Nonetheless, given the solid adoption of mobile banking, Thailand is far from being a cashless society, with an estimated 55% of transactions still conducted using cash, and how this would continue to trend remains an open question.

The Co-Founder’s Vision: Architects of a Cashless Future

At Beam, we’re proud to accelerate the strive towards being a primarily cashless nation through multiple facets from payment education, to delivering payments infrastructure. Let’s see our co-founder’s perspective on the cashless future of Thailand.

Win Vareekasem - The Visionary: How payments become more than transactions, but a growth engine for businesses and the nation 

Money, as a major catalyst for trade and the expansion of economies, has reached a point where its physical form in cash is now holding back most transactions rather than boosting them. Cards and QR payments are both rapidly replacing cash, allowing faster, more efficient, and secure transactions. As a payments platform, we are looking to continuously build on each merchant’s and consumer’s ability to go cashless.

Nattapat Chaimanowong – The Builder: Breaking down complexity into simple, accessible tools that SMEs can adopt with ease 

The nuances behind each merchant’s cashier create an interesting challenge for us to come up with simple and accessible tools. We started Beam in 2019, a time where many merchants were accepting a combination of cash and QR PromptPay. The latter, although originally designed for peer-to-peer payments, has been mass-adopted for B2C payments, creating a unique situation for us not to add a third system to manage but rather a single system that uplifts their experience.

Mike Chinakrit Piamchon – The Strategist: Orchestrating partnerships and enterprises to accelerate Thailand’s transition

We relinquish the challenge to distribute our payment products effectively & efficiently to accelerate the adoption and change towards “cashlessness”. This stems from ensuring that our team understands our merchants inside out, and that we take special care of the entire journey from building awareness, to their first transaction, and to facilitating growth for our merchants together with our peers in the ecosystem.

Key Challenges in Thailand’s Current Payment Landscape

At present, there are various payment methods that merchants are able to offer to their customers, but they are often limited to a few channels. One of the most challenging payment scenarios is that some SMEs cannot use EDCs or payment terminals as an alternative payment due to business limitations and the friction in obtaining such devices. While some SMEs confront a host of complications using EDC as their payment method, and in order to accept cash is now followed by various operations that require higher workloads than receiving digital payments.

A Call to the Future: Beam Leading the Cashless Frontier

The future of business is not just defined by transactions, but by the opportunities they unlock. At Beam, we believe that Thai SMEs can accelerate without obstacles, where entrepreneurs are empowered to scale their business, and where consumers pay confidently with any method available. This becomes a truly cashless economy, not just a convenience, but it’s a foundation of a thriving business, in which they can grow into the proper direction. 

Beam’s commitment to lead in this frontier, to reimagine how payments can power progress, and to drive the cashless movement that reshapes Thailand’s business payment. This is to reiterate our mission, which is to continue leading the world’s simplest way to checkout. 

Last but not least, we are preparing a breakthrough solution for Thai SMEs, one that will elevate payment acceptance to an entirely new level. This innovation will empower businesses with the flexibility to accept a wider range of payment methods, from cards and QR to E-Wallets, all seamlessly integrated into one powerful device. As we look further ahead, something new awaits at the horizon, another step closer towards the frictionless future of payment we aim for.