This is evident in the individual customer group, with almost 60 percent having no access to formal channels of credit, 37 percent of which are low-income consumers with annual income less than 100,000 baht. Access to deposit for the individual customer group is not as grave a problem as access to credit, although about one-eighth of this group still has no access to deposit. Quantitative gap: corporate customer group In terms of quantitative gap, it displays a similar pattern of deficiency in the corporate customer group to that of the previous group, but to a much lesser extent, with less than a quarter of corporate customers lacking access to credit and a mere half percent to deposit. Qualitative gap: the urban low income group and the rural low income group The survey reveals qualitative gaps among low-income customers that bear the brunt of inadequate financial services. Low-income customers in urban and rural areas face common problem of limited access to distribution channels of formal financial service providers, forcing some urban low-income customers to resort to loan sharks as the main source of financing. The rural low-income group in both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors also encounters the problem of limited choices of financial services, while the low-income customers in agricultural sector face additional problem of high funding cost.
In the fifth part I shall address the cost-benefit issues that sooner or later inevitably turn up whenever measures to improve resilience are discussed. I shall conclude with a summing-up of my main points. Value: significance and driving forces The main function of banks is intermediation. In its basic form intermediation takes place between borrowers and lenders. Additional intermediation functions are - among many others - making payments and buying and selling securities on behalf of clients. Over the past decades we have seen a huge decrease in the costs of intermediation. This has drastically changed the structure of the banking sector and, at a more general level, the structure of the whole financial sector. Two factors have triggered this change. First, competition in the markets has increased as a consequence of reduced trade barriers and of deregulation. Trade barriers not only in goods but also in services including financial services and in financial assets have been progressively lifted. This has led to rapidly growing interaction among economies, not least in the area of banking and financial services. Countries participating in this process have seen their domestic financial markets become deeply integrated with markets abroad. Distance and location, increasingly becoming less of an obstacle, no longer give protection from competition. This is globalization. Second, technological progress, especially in information technology (IT) and telecommunications, has exerted an all-pervasive pressure to innovate at the level of processes and products and has greatly affected the way the financial sector organizes itself.