I suddenly find myself with a sizable sum of cash to put on deposit. Given that the deposit protection drops from 50 million Baht to 25 million Baht on 11 August next year, and again to only 1 million Baht from August 2016, I decided to have a look at Thai bank credit ratings. The attached document show the banks rated from most to least secure. As expected, interest rates (and I used the 12 month fixed deposit rate as the benchmark here) broadly rise as credit ratings fall, with a couple of exceptions: ICBC (Thai) and CIMB (Thai) offer higher rates than might be anticipated. In particular, ICBC (Thai) with its AAA Fitch rating and an interest rate of 2.875% looks particularly good.

(For two banks - Standard Chartered (Thai) and Thai Credit Retail Bank I couldn't find any rating information.)

Edited March 27, 201412 yr by AyG

Stan Chart Thailand is Fitch AAA (Thai) and Moody's A3. It has the equal highest rating of any "local" bank in Thailand, as per your list.

For anyone not familiar the Fitch ratings listed here are "national" or "local" ratings and not the same as a global Fitch rating. Basically they re-calibrate the scale so it starts AAA (Tha) as otherwise as you can see from the S&P/Moody's rating they all cluster within a couple of notches.

In addition to the credit ratings there's also the liquidity side of things. ICBC and CIMB have weaker branch networks for raising retail deposits.

Cheers

Fletch