Tisco to enter digital banking arena next year
TISCO Financial Group will roll out its first digital-banking operations early next year in a move that is expected to help the group expand its customer base, as well as lower operating costs in the long run. Group chief Oranuch Apisaksirikul said yesterday.
Although Tisco is currently the only listed bank not to have any digital-banking operations, Oranuch said it had had a policy to enter the digital arena for a number of years, while it should be noted that it had fewer branches than its peers in the sector.
“Our digital banking will be developed on cloud computing. Our back office has been revamped for the upcoming digital banking,” she said.
Tisco’s mobile banking will be launched early next year, with the bank then gradually developing additional features as its mobile banking will eventually be a channel for lending applications, apart from servicing transactional banking, she explained.
She added that the bank hoped that digital banking would help lower its operating expenses in the long run, and that mobile banking would enable it to expand the customer base to mass-market clients.
For Tisco’s deposit and investment products, middle-to-upper-market customers form its key client base, while its retail lending customers are in the auto-loan segment.
Tisco, which is the third-largest auto lender in the banking industry with a portfolio of Bt180 billion, expects its outstanding auto loans to show flat growth next year, after a further fall this year due to repaid loans remaining higher than new lending, the group chief said.
The level of new auto loans will return to normal in 2017 and 2018 after buyers under the previous elected government’s first-car tax-break scheme begin to trade their vehicles in after owning them for five years, she added.
That programme was launched in 2012. Meanwhile, Tisco has embraced fee income from selling insurance and mutual funds to sustain profitability, while its fee income from investment banking this year should outperform the market because Tisco Securities – the securities arm of Tisco Financial Group – has many initial-public-offering deals over the course of the year.
Tisco Asset Management, together with the Thaipat Institute, yesterday held an exclusive talk titled “Sustainable Investment: ESG Fund for Society”, in order to promote its ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) Fund widely among individual investors.
Theeranat Rujimethapass, managing director of Tisco Asset Management, said the company believed the return on investment in listed sustainable-business companies was no lower than for general listed companies.
Based on the total return of the Stock Exchange of Thailand over five years – from June 30, 2010, to July 10, 2015 – the return was 123 per cent, while the return on investment of companies in the “universe” of the ESG100 index was 160 per cent, he said. Stocks in the ESG100 were less volatile than the overall market, he added.
Tisco Asset Management has introduced the TISCO ESG Investment Fund for Society (TISESG-S) to individual Thai investors, with the fund set to invest in listed companies that are outstanding performers in the ESG100.
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