Krungsri Krungsri’s developer portal and the State of Open Banking in 2025: Progress with Purpose
- Sarah Huang
- Jun 1
- 5 min read
In 2025, Thailand’s financial sector is in the midst of a significant transformation. With open banking frameworks continuing to evolve and regulators such as the Bank of Thailand (BOT) driving increased interoperability and competition, financial institutions face a clear mandate: adapt or risk irrelevance. Among the country’s top-tier banks, Krungsri (Bank of Ayudhya PCL), a member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), has emerged as a calculated and committed player in this space.
Krungsri’s developer portal approach to open banking is both purposeful and measured—favoring foundational infrastructure, real use cases, and secure, regulatory-aligned rollouts over experimental innovation for innovation’s sake. This article offers an opinionated yet respectful analysis of Krungsri’s current standing and future readiness, examining the structural, technological, and strategic pillars that underpin its open banking journey.
Strategic Framing: From Digital Banking to Open Finance
Krungsri’s digital transformation has matured from internal process digitization into broader ecosystem collaboration. The bank recognizes that open banking is not just about exposing APIs—it’s about creating platforms that enable third-party value creation, while maintaining customer trust.
Krungsri’s developer portal sees open finance as an extension of its role in customer lives—not as a threat to traditional services but as an opportunity to enhance them. This mindset is visible in its developer-facing assets, fintech partnerships, and SME enablement initiatives.
Developer Portal and API Catalogue: Public, Structured, and Growing
Krungsri’s developer portal is one of the most public and technically detailed platforms in Thailand. It offers a mix of RESTful APIs across business lines:
Fund Transfer APIs: Internal transfers and third-party payments
Pay with Krungsri APIs: Allowing partners to integrate with mobile apps like KMA
Tokenization APIs: For card payments with secure tokens
PromptPay Notification APIs: Enabling real-time confirmation of bill payments
Corporate and SME tools: Including APIs for invoice validation, biller integration, and KYC
What sets this apart is the consistency and quality of documentation. Sandbox access, test data, and consent workflows are all made transparent. Developers are treated as partners, not just API consumers.
Use Case Depth: Innovation Rooted in Need
Krungsri has focused its API efforts on business domains with tangible ROI:
Gold Trading: With Hua Seng Heng, Krungsri powers real-time gold investment directly from bank accounts, enabled by APIs that support trading, settlement, and balance reconciliation.
SME Bill Payment Integration: In partnership with Express Software Group, Krungsri offers APIs that let small businesses auto-generate QR invoices and reconcile payments via mobile. This simplifies cash flow management for tens of thousands of SMEs.
Loan Pre-Approval: Automotive loan APIs allow dealerships to submit customer data for real-time pre-screening—improving the financing experience without requiring branch visits.
Each of these cases is rooted in real market needs and delivered with API-first thinking.
Platform Architecture: Cloud-Ready and Scalable
Krungsri’s developer portal has invested significantly in a cloud-native backend built around Red Hat OpenShift, AWS Lambda, and containerized microservices. APIs are published via Apigee, providing robust developer analytics, quota enforcement, and gateway-level monitoring.
This modular architecture supports:
Rapid iteration of services
Granular access control
Fine-grained authentication (OAuth2, etc)
Resilience under high traffic volumes
These capabilities reflect a clear intent to treat APIs not as IT appendages, but as strategic digital products.
Governance, Security, and Consent
Open banking requires confidence in the system. Krungsri’s APIs are backed by a comprehensive security and consent governance model:
Token-based access control for every API interaction
Audit trails for consent flows, especially around fund access
Tiered developer access, limiting high-risk operations to verified business partners
PDPA-aligned consent handling across digital onboarding and eKYC flows
This focus on trust and traceability builds a defensible path toward open data portability.
eKYC and Digital Onboarding
Through its iPro Onboarding System, Krungsri enables full digital KYC for retail and corporate users. The system integrates with Thailand’s national ID database and the Department of Business Development (DBD), allowing:
Auto-fetching of shareholder and director data
Real-time cross-validation with BOT and Anti-Money Laundering Office (AMLO) sources
Identity verification via biometric and document scanning
These capabilities are critical for building a secure, scalable open ecosystem.
Fintech Collaboration: TWo tangos
Krungsri’s open banking journey is not being undertaken in isolation. The bank actively partners with:
Remittance startups, offering white-labeled backend rails for money movement
Retail platforms, embedding finance through buy-now-pay-later APIs
Logistics and delivery companies, integrating payment and insurance products via app plugins
These collaborations position Krungsri as a platform bank, enabling others to serve customers through modular banking services.
Data, AI, and Smart Insights
Krungsri’s use of open banking data is amplified by its data science investments:
Real-time customer segmentation via AWS Glue and Redshift
AI-driven credit scoring for SMEs using alternate data
Fraud detection powered by machine learning models built on SageMaker
In parallel, Krungsri has launched initiatives exploring the ethical use of generative AI for customer service, policy explanation, and digital agent training.
Regional Readiness: Beyond Thailand
As a MUFG subsidiary, Krungsri is naturally aligned with cross-border interoperability. The bank supports international QR payments, regional trade financing APIs, and foreign worker onboarding via remittance partners.
This cross-border posture will become increasingly important as ASEAN-level API standards evolve. Krungsri is well-positioned to act as a gateway bank for regional API harmonization.
Strategic Gaps and Opportunities
While Krungsri’s open banking roadmap is strong, opportunities for further evolution remain:
Aggregator Collaboration: Krungsri does not yet publicly offer open APIs to aggregators like TrueMoney or foreign fintechs. Expanding this access—under strong consent policies—would enhance ecosystem impact.
Customer Consent Dashboards: Providing consumers with real-time dashboards of third-party access to their data would promote transparency and user control.
Developer Monetization Models: Offering tiered API access with pricing, SLA guarantees, and usage analytics could encourage broader fintech adoption.
Expanded SME Tools: APIs for payroll, invoice financing, and tax support would further Krungsri’s SME banking mission.
These areas represent next-phase evolution, rather than gaps in intent or capability.
A Comparative View in Thailand’s Market
Among its peers, Krungsri strikes a balance between digital ambition and institutional caution. Compared to:
Kasikornbank: Which leads on mobile UX and has extensive fintech lab infrastructure
SCB: Which has pushed faster into AI and embedded finance
Bangkok Bank: Which takes a regional-first strategy focused on infrastructure
Krungsri’s positioning feels like a “platform enabler with strong rails”. It is less visible in consumer-facing innovation but arguably more prepared for enterprise-grade partnerships and cross-sector fintech collaboration.
Culture and Governance: The MUFG Influence
Krungsri’s Japanese heritage brings a tone of structured growth, regulatory alignment, and long-term commitment. There is less appetite for untested ideas and more focus on reliability, auditability, and enterprise-grade readiness.
This governance model, though sometimes slower to market, may become an asset as regulators tighten controls on financial data sharing. Krungsri’s compliance-centric infrastructure gives it a trusted brand posture.
Final Reflections: Building with Purpose
Krungsri in 2025 is not attempting to win the innovation arms race. Instead, it is playing a longer, steadier game—one rooted in infrastructure quality, real customer outcomes, and responsible data stewardship.
Its developer portal is accessible. Its APIs are live and documented. Its ecosystem of partners is expanding. And its leadership views open banking not as a trend, but as a structural evolution of modern financial services.
For policymakers, Krungsri represents a model of controlled innovation. For fintechs, it offers enterprise-class rails to build upon. For customers, it promises integrated experiences backed by trust and security.
In Thailand’s evolving open finance story, Krungsri’s role may be understated—but it is foundational.
Structure is not a constraint—it is a launchpad.
As the bank continues to expand access, deepen its platform strategy, and work with emerging innovators, it could very well become one of Southeast Asia’s most dependable enablers of open, secure, and inclusive digital finance.
Citations --
Krungsri Developer - https://developers.krungsri.com/
