“Korean banks fled Thailand following the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. After the mass departure, there has been an unwritten law in Thailand that bans them from returning to the country. Also, Thailand is known to be a country with a high bar for foreign banks overall, not just for those from Korea,” an official from a local finance firm said.
The last foreign commercial banks to have earned a license for operation in Thailand were the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank in 2015. The Thai market has not seen new foreign players in the…
