Thailand is transitioning to a new era of digital payment system and financial technology in which the Bank of Thailand is fully committed to foster. First and foremost, electronic payment infrastructures must be put in place to realize the full potential of digital economy. Under the National e-Payment Masterplan, last year the Bank of Thailand together with the Ministry of Finance and 6/10  the Thai Bankers’ Association launched our new faster payment system – PromptPay – which propelled the wider adoption of e-payment in Thailand. PromptPay is an instant payment platform that links bank accounts to various forms of identification including national ID numbers and mobile phone numbers. With PromptPay, funds can be transferred to a recipient’s preferred bank account in real time and at virtually no cost. This new technology has significantly boosted the usage of mobile banking, and has potential to lead to significant growth in e-commerce in Thailand as well as to radically change the way government welfare payments are distributed. In just over a year since the launch of PromptPay, there are over 40 million IDs registered on the platform and more than 2.7 million transactions a day. The increasing usage of PromptPay also served as a catalyst that eventually led to the announcements of most commercial banks two months ago, to eliminate transfer fees for all transfers through mobile and online banking. All in all, PromptPay provides a crucial payment infrastructure which opens the door to many other digital payment services.
The inflation surge could nevertheless be transient, and then hopefully stabilise in a new regime of “controlled reflation”. The jump in euro area headline inflation in early 2021 did come as a surprise (it rose from -0.3% to +1.3%); Nonetheless, the causes of this increase are temporary in nature, like the recent rebound in oil prices, the reversal of the VAT rate cut in Germany and from modified weights in the HICP basket. Over the medium term, the persistence of substantial economic slack over the projection horizon, despite a significant  Page 5 sur 9 recovery from the second half of this year, will weigh on inflation. All in all, the March 2021 ECB projections show that headline inflation would remain weak, at 1.4% in 2023. Inflation is therefore not yet where we would like it to be, back towards 2% over the medium term. Our inflation objective must be understood as simple, symmetric and medium-term oriented. iii “Simple” means that we could reexamine oversophisticated qualifiers still associated with the 2 % figure. “Symmetric” refers to the fact that our objective is a target and not a ceiling: we might be ready to accept inflation higher than 2% for some time. Finally “medium term” means that we assess inflation performance over a long enough period, looking forward, but also not ignoring the past.