Spending via credit cards slows down, says central bank

BANGKOK: -- Bank of Thailand’s Governor-designate Tarisa Watanagase revealed on Sunday spending through credit cards had slowed down although a number of the newly-issued cards continued to increase.

She said the phenomenon reflected people, who hold many credit cards, failed to use all.

She reiterated the central bank would give an importance to a collection of outstanding loans.

Since the end of the third quarter of this year, the loans had continued to edge down.

As a result, the central bank would not come up with any new measures to strictly supervise the number of credit cards

But it would impose a minimum installment payment rate at 10 per cent of a loan amount, determine qualifications of supplement credit card holders, and raise interest rates charged through credit cards to 20 per cent from 18 per cent, she said.

The central bank’s Financial Institution Policy Group reported as of the end of September, a number of credit cards totaled 10,655,290, up 173,830 from 10,481,460 at the end of the first quarter.

Of this, 4,245,505 are local credit cards, up 199,141 from that of the second quarter of this year, 1,182,416 are foreign credit banks, up 20,057, and 5,227,369 are credit cards issued by non-bank institutions, up 45,368.

Outstanding loans as of the end of the third quarter totaled 160.37 billion baht, up 6.27 billion baht, from that of the previous quarter.

Of this, 52.28 billion baht are sought by local banks, up 2.05 billion baht, 32.55 billion baht are foreign banks, up 1.48 billion baht, 75.54 billion baht are non-bank institutions, up 2.99 billion baht.

--TNA 2006-11-13

Anyone out there involved in the finance industry that could comment

on these statistics ? They could be interpreted in 2 ways :-

1. is this a sign the people have more cash in their pockets so they

can afford to rely less on credit

or

2. is it a sign of " belt tightening " ?

They are at the limit of their Credit Card (CC). No further resources other than using Cash. But kidding aside. Many of the Thai staff I work with have a lot of CC's stuffed in their wallets. It seems that they collect them just for fun as now the CC companies offer Cards without yearly fees due. On the other hand at the head office we also have a lot of incoming mail from CC companies sueing staff for non payments towards the CC's. In fact we have stopped issuing employment letters addressed to financial offices.

thanks for that response - that explains a lot.

yes I doubted somehow that they had suddenly become

financially responsible