Thailand’s payments market has become more digital, but the operational burden for businesses has not disappeared. As collections move from cash and cheques into electronic channels, companies are receiving more payments through more routes, from more customers, projects, branches and business units. The transaction may be faster, but the finance team still has to know who paid, what the payment was for and how it should be reconciled.

That is the problem Krungthai Bank is trying to address through its virtual account initiative. Rather than treating virtual accounts as only a receivables product, the bank is positioning the solution as part of a broader transaction banking and treasury management architecture. The service was developed in 2025, officially launched in February 2026, and further enhancements were added in 2026 to expand its capabilities.

Varanitch Ujjin, Head of Global Transaction Banking Group at Krungthai Bank, said the initiative came from recurring client frustration, particularly around account receivables and account management. “After we heard the voice of our customers, we decided to build our own in-house platform to manage the virtual account,” she said.

Electronic payments created a reconciliation problem

The starting point for Krungthai’s virtual account strategy was a shift in client behaviour. More organisations in Thailand are moving from cheques and cash into electronic payments. That shift improves speed and convenience, but it can make payer identification more difficult when incoming funds are not clearly linked to a customer, invoice, project or business unit.

For finance teams, this creates a practical problem. Money arrives, but the organisation still has to determine its source, purpose and accounting treatment. When payment references are incomplete or inconsistent, reconciliation becomes manual. The result is slower financial closing, fragmented cash visibility and higher operational workload.

Ujjin described this as a “good problem” created by payment digitalisation. From a collections point of view, she said, many organisations, including SMEs and large corporates, struggle to “understand and find the source of funds” once electronic payments arrive. The difficulty then affects account receivables reconciliation.

Krungthai’s response was to build a virtual account platform that allows companies to assign dedicated account numbers to specific customers, projects, departments, branches, business units or transaction purposes. Incoming payments can then be identified more automatically, without requiring the client to open and maintain multiple physical bank accounts.

The pain was clearest in education

Education was one of the earliest sectors where the pain became highly visible, making it an important trigger for the initiative. Ujjin said the pain point emerged across multiple industries, but was particularly common among universities. In Thailand, universities often manage research centres, grants and externally funded projects, each of which may require separate tracking of receipts and expenditure.

“In the past, they had to open a lot of accounts for each project,” Ujjin said. “Let’s say there are 100 new projects a year, and each project probably lasts for 18 months, 24 months or longer than that.”

That creates a compounding account management problem. If a university opens new physical accounts for each research project every year, those accounts remain active across overlapping project cycles. Finance teams then have to manage account opening, access rights, reporting, balances, statements and reconciliation across a growing number of accounts.

Ujjin said nearly 20 educational institutions in Thailand had faced similar pain points. Some had already seen virtual account capabilities offered by international or regional banks, but still wanted to maintain their primary banking relationship with a local Thai bank. That client demand became an important signal for Krungthai.

The same operating challenge is not limited to educational institutions. Similar requirements can be found across many Thai businesses, including shopping malls, hospitals, logistics companies and multi-branch corporates, where incoming funds must be identified, tracked and managed by customer, tenant, branch or business unit. In each case, organisations require a more efficient way to monitor transactions without the operational burden of opening and maintaining large numbers of physical bank accounts.

These use cases also show why virtual accounts are not only a banking convenience. They can support governance. Across industries, organisations often have requirements around how money is received, used and reported. A virtual account structure allows clients to segregate funds by business unit, transaction purpose or project while retaining centralised visibility at the master account level.

One master account can support thousands of virtual accounts

Krungthai’s model links virtual accounts to a physical master account. The client must maintain at least one actual account with the bank, but does not need to open a new physical account for each project, customer or internal purpose. Once subscribed, the client can create and assign virtual accounts under the master account through Krungthai BUSINESS, the bank’s corporate digital banking platform.

The bank allows up to 10,000 virtual accounts under a single master account. Clients can define business-specific references, assign user access rights and manage reporting at both virtual account and master account levels.

The virtual account sits on top of the underlying bank account rather than replacing it. Actual funds remain posted to the physical master account, while the virtual accounts provide transaction-level identification, segregation and reporting. In operational terms, the company gets the control benefits of multiple accounts without the administrative cost of opening and maintaining them physically.

The reporting structure also reflects this duality. At the virtual account level, the client can see detailed information on the payer, transaction purpose or business reference. At the master account level, the client can see consolidated balances and summary reporting across all related virtual accounts.

Collections are the first use case, but not the end point

Krungthai’s initial focus was collections, because payer identification and receivables reconciliation were the clearest customer pain points. Ujjin said the bank’s strategic move was to prioritise “the very common pain of the customer”, which was more likely to sit on the collection side.

The solution also supports broader use cases. On the receivables side, it can be applied to customer collections, project funding, tenant payments, distributor payments or departmental receipts. On the payments side, the May 2026 launch of Payments on Behalf Of allows companies to centralise payment execution and manage outgoing flows under a virtual account structure.

This broadens the solution from account receivables into treasury operations. For large corporate groups, virtual accounts can support centralised treasury models, including in-house bank structures, internal fund allocation, branch funding, project-based disbursement and cashless petty cash management.

A virtual account can be a reconciliation tool, but it can also become a treasury control tool. Once incoming and outgoing flows are linked to virtual structures, finance teams can manage liquidity, reporting, governance and internal allocation with greater precision.

Local design is part of the proposition

Krungthai is not claiming that virtual accounts are new globally. Foreign banks have already offered similar capabilities in Thailand. The bank’s differentiator is local execution: building a Thai-bank solution around domestic operating behaviour, local payment flows and clients that may prefer to keep account management with a local institution.

Ujjin said Krungthai was the first local Thai commercial bank to introduce this capability in the local market, positioning it for corporates and institutions that want advanced transaction banking capabilities without shifting their operating accounts to an international bank.

The in-house build also gives Krungthai more control over future development. The platform is delivered through Krungthai BUSINESS, which means virtual account management can sit alongside cash management, payments, collections, liquidity management, reconciliation and treasury services in a single corporate environment.

For clients, the value lies in reducing fragmentation. Instead of managing collections in one system, statements in another, payments separately and reconciliation partly offline, the virtual account structure creates a more integrated operating layer.

Early adoption suggests demand, but the model is still developing

The solution remains relatively new. The bank states that within the first few months after launch, Krungthai saw live adoption by several universities and gradually compounded opportunities from education and corporate clients. That is early-stage adoption rather than mature scale, but it indicates that the pain point is real.

The May 2026 Payment on behalf of enhancement has also generated interest from corporates seeking to centralise payment operations, improve internal fund allocation and reduce reliance on cash for use cases such as petty cash management. Client feedback has already pointed to further control requirements, including beneficiary restrictions to limit payments to predefined recipients.

For Krungthai, the opportunity is to turn virtual accounts into a broader treasury infrastructure layer. The first client problem is reconciliation. The larger problem is how companies manage cash, control payments and connect organisation-wide money flows without multiplying physical account structures.

That places virtual accounts in the same broader direction as modern transaction banking: fewer physical accounts, more data-rich structures, stronger liquidity visibility and more automated reconciliation. The product is operationally specific, but the implications are wider. As corporate payment volumes grow and digital channels become the default, the value of transaction banking will increasingly depend not only on moving money, but on helping clients interpret, organise and control the flows that digital payments create.