Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, unfortunately we are talking about more bad news as it pertains to banking especially for expats here in Thailand. Before I get into the main thrust of this video there was a comment put on another video I did recently and the comment went, "hey, Ben, B bank" - I think they mean Bangkok Bank - "has announced quote, "Mobile Banking will be temporarily unavailable on Sunday August 17th 2025 from 2.00 a.m. to 9.00 am." So when everyone starts complaining "you don't have to make a video about it," Fair enough, if that is really what was sent out, then there's a message for folks out there, and I thank the commenter for bringing that up. 

I am getting into I expect probably some pretty deep dives into some stuff having to do with the Border; I think the stuff having to do with the Border I will be doing in kind of a special report for the paid news service but I expect next week Sunday, I'll probably be doing another deep dive into tax, banking, general expat stuff as well as whatever news percolates up between now and then. Those who are interested in that check us out, [email protected]. Also while I am on the topic of my own book, probably not unfair to bring up the fact as I have discussed in other videos, my better half and I have set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok. American Diner style food, including breakfast anytime. Pancake Palace. If you are interested in that, the link is in the description below. Again, American Diner style food and breakfast anytime. 

Back to the issue of banking though, the main thrust of this video actually came from another person who emailed me and hats off to the person who did. I am going to leave you anonymous but I am going to go ahead and read what you sent; so sent by email. Quoting directly: "Came across this today, may be interesting for you. And this is from huahinforum.boards.net. Quoting directly: "Foreigners are slowing" (I think they meant slowly, but it says slowing) "Foreigners are slowly being locked out of or limited from using Thai mobile banking apps." Quoting further: "Just tried to send some money from myself to myself to top up my Visa account balance using Thai mobile banking apps and it turned into something out of a Kafka novel." Yeah, yeah, a lot of that going around; a lot of Kafkaesque stuff going around right now. It seems like between the World Economic Forum and the OECD, that is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, so-called which if this is development, take me back to undeveloped thank you. But yeah, it's just Kafka stuff everywhere. Banking, Immigration, the combination thereof; it's just ridiculous. That said quoting further: "Apparently, the Thai banks have started restricting foreign account holders for making transactions using their apps - I wanted to send 200k (I am presuming 200,000 baht) from SCB to K Bank using the apps (which I've done before) but now, mai dai. The SCB app refused the transfer throwing up a warning that my facial recognition was not in their system." I mean come on; this is ridiculous. If this isn't totalitarianism, what is? And meanwhile, what would life have been like if Thailand would have adopted the so-called Digital Wallet? I mean this is what it's like when we still have some of the residue of the standard system with some of the residue of basic notions of privacy and this is how it is over moving 6,000 bucks, 200,000 Baht, really? Quoting further: "My facial recognition was not in their system, and I needed to physically go to the bank. Popped into the local branch expecting a quick photo and enabling the app, but they wanted to scrutinize my phone number (which I have had for 25 years), SIM registration status". - Again, this is the bank. This is the bank asking for all this crap. What gives them the right to do this? I get it. Affirmatively it is their platform, their protocols, but this is back door totalitarianism and it's what is the outcome of the if you will fascist iteration of totalitarianism, because the private enterprises do what the state can't do and that's what is happening here. The state can't come in and tell foreigners, "oh we need all this stuff, and we need your SIM card, we need all of this for you to move money around", but the banks, because they are private, they can do that. And this is just a telltale sign, just a hallmark of World Economic Forum thinking and modus operandi, and it's the worst thing for Thailand. Does anybody in a policy making capacity in Thailand think this stuff is going to add to investor confidence? Is going to cause money to come to Thailand? Especially good old-fashioned cash being transferred in to set up small businesses that benefit the street level economy which by the way, that is who you are going to have a problem with if it all sops up, and there is no liquidity, there is no investment coming in at the street level. Those people get angry, and we have seen what happens. Take a look at 2010. Nobody wants that, or maybe the World Economic Forum does, for their own ends against Thailand. This is serious stuff. It's not just banking we're talking about here. They are trying to have an undue influence on the very fundamental sinews of Thai Society, okay? I remember when I first got here one of the things I really was first taken with, and I loved about this place is we didn't have all this nonsense with banking. That banking was just oh, you walk up to an ATM, you need to send somebody some money, drop some cash into a deposit machine, type in their account, verify it, boom! It's gone. They have got it now. That is what creates a dynamic economy. The ability to quickly move liquidity around, and I'm sick and tired of "know your customer" and money laundering and scammers and whatever. That's all pretext. I mean how many scammers are there really out there? And by the way, they all seem to be Chinese, so where is Immigration on that issue? I mean seriously. We have mechanisms to deal with scammers, we always have. This banking stuff is just Orwellian totalitarian nonsense, and it will destroy Thailand's economy. Quoting further: "SIM registration status, Bank book and passport number (which changes every time you get a new one), saying that they needed to contact the Bangkok call center to authorize it since the bank had no way of dealing with foreign customers."

You know I am going to put a guy's Twitter up. There is a guy named Dave Collum. I may put some links; in fact I will put some links to some recent videos he's done podcasting with some other people out there on YouTube. I really like Dave. Apparently, he is going to be on Tucker here pretty soon. He already apparently recorded it but they haven't put it out yet. He talks about how he thinks the system is going to become increasingly brittle with this digitization and what he is talking about there is, there are increasingly less and less people - especially in the Western system - and Thailand's trailing behind that, thank God, and I hope especially with the possibility of a different Government we could see this at least somewhat hopefully reverse; I prefer it all be reversed. None of this is good for Thailand, but what he is talking about is a brittleness where you can't get anything done. You run up against some problem on the digital system and then you go in to try to talk to somebody, they can't do anything, they have got to have you call into the call center which those people at the call center are buffered against you actually interacting with them on a personal basis, so if they can't get anything done, it's no skin off their back, they just are like "oh well, whatever, deal with it." I put up a thumbnail on a prior video talking about banking where I likened into an old S&L sketch "we're the phone company, we don't care, we don't have to!" That's the mentality. But as this becomes increasingly brittle, and it's becoming so in the West, and Thailand needs to seriously scrutinize this and throw it out because it is bad for this economy. This brittleness, this digitization where nobody can do anything, nobody wants to do anything, and nothing can get done, it will destroy our economy. We have seen it, we are seeing it in real time in Western Europe, to some extent in the United States, although some of it is being turned back most notably because Mr., Trump among other things, and by the way all the hate in the comments where people are calling me some kind of Trump idolizer, have you listened to my videos? I'm pretty middle of the road on the issue of Trump. I think he has done some good things; I think he's done some stuff I don't like. On top of that, I have said it before and I will say it again, to my mind he was better than the alternative in 2024. He just is what he is. He's a President. Stop, I am tired of this treating him as something other than that, but in any event, Mr. Trump brought up a very valid point when he issued the Executive Memorandum that said "hey OECD is done in the United States, and he specifically cited it as a threat to National Sovereignty. I read that out on this channel at the time; it is a threat to National Sovereignty, and we are seeing it here. It's a threat to the underlying economy via the banking system and this brittleness that Dave Collum brings up, it will harm Thailand's economy, it will, it just simply will. Watch, overtime, we're seeing it. I mean the economy is slow by any metric. Part of the reason for that is all this tax nonsense that has been brought in - again via the OECD. I think a lot of folks that would otherwise be here in Thailand this year are not because they are counting the number of days they can be in Thailand, so they don't hit the magical 183-day mark and thereby need to go ahead and file any kind of taxes. That scares them. In most cases they don't actually have to; I have discussed this in other videos, but it scares them away. On top of that, now we are tightening up all the liquidity so nobody can move any money around easily. That is a recipe for destroying the economy which is another reason why I have likened the WEF to Communism. Communists hate the vibrant economy. A vibrant economy has people in it who can operate, who have their own prerogatives, who are not interested in listening to dictate from Polit Bureau apparatchiks, okay? And I find it very concerning that all of this is being brought in at the same time we have a former or whatever, avowed Communist, Communist Guerrilla as the "acting PM". All of this stuff is very concerning to my mind for Thailand and again if it keeps up, if this trend continues, this is not going to bode well for the economy here and it is going to have the worst impact at the street level, and folks in a policy making position need to be looking at that because it is going to be you who those people at the street level who aren't getting the same economic activity that they are used to, are going to be looking at. 

Quoting further: "Saying they needed to contact the Bangkok call center to authorize it since the bank had no way of dealing with foreign customers." So you lock these people out, they can't even go anywhere to deal with anything. Again, as Dave Collum brought up: brittle, very brittle, and that kind of system breaks off. Do we want another '97 because this is the kind of stuff that leads to those kind of economic problems. Quoting further: "The apps for Thais have built in facial recognition linked to their ID biometrics." Well that's its own problem. I mean who's in favour of that? I am certainly not. I don't use digital banking. “The call center couldn't speak English, and the bank staff were limited so my Thai came into play, but that wasn't enough. The woman on the phone told me at a million miles per hour"- and that is an interesting one, I have seen this in other videos. They brought up the fact that these folks that work in these businesses and things that have to deal with this are getting an attitude because they are getting tired of having to hear all these complaints and things. Is this what we want? Thailand to have our national sort of happiness metric, because that's something Thailand is known for as well, is the Thais are a happy people. We have had this OECD and WEF nonsense come in here and just corroded all away and now these people are really not pleasant to deal with at all. That is what we want is a nation of bureaucrats and clerks who all have a huffy attitude? Quoting further: "million miles per hour that if I wanted to send more than 50k, I need to go to the bank and phone the call center every time I want to make a transaction due to new government rules restricting foreigners which apparently apply to all Thai banking mobile apps." Oh great. So now foreigners can't transfer more than 50K without going through some rigamarole. I have got to be honest with you. This is going to have a terrible negative impact on the overall economy. I don't see how it can't. I mean 50K for anybody who's unaware, that's 1,500US roughly, depending on the day and the exchange rate, okay? I mean Thais who are contractors, Thais who are furniture sellers, landscapers, I mean there are bills that need to be paid that are more than 50,000 baht and effectively this stuff is locking those Thai vendors out of the foreign market here in Thailand. That's what's really happening. And on top of it, it's also predicated on this whole "oh we'll just" - it's Communist thinking or fascist thinking; however you want to look at it; totalitarian thinking. It's basically group punishment, communal punishment. "Oh, there are scammers out there, therefore now everybody can't transfer more than 50K. 

Oh there are Chinese scammers or there are whatever scammers out there; name a nationality. Any nationality is going to have some level of scammers here in Thailand but okay we are all foreign. Anybody that is not Thai, they are all foreign, the expat community is all foreign. "Oh we'll just put that restriction on everybody", instead of doing good police work and just tracking down the scammers. "No we will just restrict everyone." This is nonsense. That said, quoting further: "I gave up and eventually tried sending 49,000 four times which worked -- have also cleared out the SCB account now as the app is next to useless (despite it telling me I have a 200K transfer limit); haven't tried the same process with the K Bank app. I thanked the God of Finance for crypto on the way home." I don't know what you are thanking God for crypto for. I mean crypto is just a different iteration of an online system, and I know of people who get on me, ohhh!! Yeah, look I get it, but at the end of the day, you are still using the computer to move the money, fundamentally, that's what it comes down to. Back to the email though, quoting: "I kind of dismissed it as hyperbole then decided to check my own K Bank app (that has been open since 2015 and I rarely use) -- sure enough, the daily limit that used to be user selectable up to 2 million Baht is now stuck on a Max of 50,000. So, we now have a situation where they are requesting foreign holders to go register their face (if they didn't do so already with the 50K plus requirement a few years ago) and they can still only transfer up to 50,000 Baht - quite amusing really. This is not the case at the moment for Bangkok Bank, at least for me, which still allows up to 2 million." Yeah, but I mean how many problems have we heard about with that one, especially as it pertains to folks who are on Retirement Visas. "Quoting further: "But is at SCB according to the shared thread. So of the only three banks that allow inbound transfers of more than 500,000 Baht, two of them now appear to only allow at least some accountholders to only spend 50,000 baht of their own money per day." Well I believe that is only on the digital app. If you go to an ATM, if you have an amount over 50,000 you can pull out more, presumably. I am presuming that so don't necessarily take me at my word audience. Maybe go out there and check yourselves. That said: "good luck buying a scooter or return Long haul flight I guess." 

Yeah, I mean that's more to the point. All this is having an effect on is detrimental to the Thai economy. It means that more people are going to look at this and be like I don't want to go over there and mess with that weird Soviet Banking, so they don't come and throw money into the economy to begin with, or if they are here, they are putting far less money than they ever would before. I mean this is such a government thing because governments don't understand how sales work, they don't understand how marketing works, they don't understand how business works. Look if you have got somebody that is about to give you 200,000 Baht and you can just digitally transfer it over, the more fluid that transaction can be, the better. And by the way, that was the premise of digital banking to begin with. It was supposed to be more convenient, less hassle, easy to deal with, and now we have seen the exact opposite in every way, shape and form since we have seen this come in.

More specifically I shouldn't say that about digital banking. It's really since we have seen this “exploration” of the OECD here in Thailand that we have started to see all this nonsense; that's where it has been coming in. But regardless, the premise for digital banking, the way they nudged everybody into that and corralled them into using it so that now people effectively don't even really know how to use standard banking or even ATMs it seems like. I find it amazing there are folks who contact us that have a problem just even bank-wiring it over, using the numbers from the bank account. They say, “well I want a QR code”. It's like really? You can't even punch in some numbers to move money? Okay, different generations have had different sort of training if you will. But that being said, this was all touted as being more convenient and again circling back to what I was saying, this is clearly government. In business we know. If you want to make a sale, the best way to do that is for the money to move as quickly as possible. To put all these obstacles in the way, this is going to have a tremendous negative impact on the economy of Thailand in terms of sales and marketing, in terms of the liquidity and the velocity of money that move through this economy, it's going to be bad, and by bad I mean it is going to be so bad that we could see ourselves moving into recessionary territory and for a government that claims it once that not to happen, they are doing everything in their power seemingly to make it happen. If you wanted to end this tomorrow, pull this OECD stuff, stop doing it, take us back to the banking system we had not some four months ago and just continue on. But what we are going to see is going to get worse. Liquidity is going to dry up more, there's going to be less economic activity and that is good for basically no one here in the Kingdom of Thailand.