Pi Securities PLC, Thailand’s leading securities brokerage company, believes in the winning combination of digitization and human touch, Chief Executive Officer Bob Wouters says.
And he announced that Pi Securities has invested tremendously in building its digital platform for customers, although he refused to give the exact number.
“Digital will provide you with a cost-effective and very good user experience. You can make it easy for people to invest. But in the end, I believe that people in Thailand still value having a personal advisor – someone that they trust who can help them navigate,” Wouters said.
According to him, Pi Securities has as many as 100 employees working in its tech and IT departments. “That number should give you an indication of how serious we are in building ourselves into fintech,” he added.
End-to-end digital platform
The CEO said that his company’s digital platform is built end-to-end, pointing out that other brokers that offer trading services through a mobile app are “still very manual in the back office”.
According to him, Pi Securities digitalized its back office last year, allowing the company to handle higher volumes and compete with lower margins. “The reason that we can compete with lower margins overall is because we are very cost-effective in the back office. That’s because we built a digital platform end to end,” he explained.
In March, the broker launched a mobile application for online investing called “Pi Financial”, allowing customers to invest and trade in multiple types of financial instruments, including stocks, mutual funds, derivatives, and bonds.
The app is part of Pi Securities’ strategy for 2024 to expand its customer base threefold through the development of comprehensive digital services, with a growth target of 1.2 billion US dollars (44 billion baht) in valuation, according to the CEO.
Human touch is a key
With tougher competition among brokerage companies in Thailand and growing pressure on the margins, Wouters says it is sensible for them to start building a digital trading platform, as it is more cost-effective than giving discounts.
“There are going to be fewer players in Thailand. I think the ones that can win are those that have a very good trading platform and a trading app,” he said.
Pi Securities, according to him, also has a “human touch” for its customers in addition to the mobile trading application – an army of more than 400 investment consultants who have personal relationships with customers and can offer them trading advice.
“I believe that’s going to be the way forward. It’s more digital, it’s more about servicing the customer and adding value as a broker. And we believe that we got all the tools in place to be at the forefront of that disruption in Thailand in the next years,” said the CEO.
He expected the trading app to help attract new customers and boost his company’s growth. Another way of expansion is to attract more investment consultants from other brokerage firms, especially those that are not building their digital platform and will go out of business.
Wouters said Pi Securities is also looking to expand its wealth business by offering new products to help customers grow their total revenue.
Big opportunity in Thailand
The CEO pointed to a “really big opportunity” in the Thai investment market, given the size of household wealth, relatively low interest rates, and a large number of prospective investors.
“If you look at the total household wealth in Thailand, roughly 50% of all the wealth in Thailand is still kept in deposits and bank accounts. There’s still a lot of money just sitting there in bank accounts waiting to be generating a better yield,” he said.
Wouters said that as Thailand is becoming an ageing society, people becoming increasingly aware that they need to start investing to offset the inflation, rather than leaving their money in their bank accounts.
“One of the reasons that we find why people are not investing is lack of knowledge and lack of access to good products. What we are doing is we are making it easier for people to trade and to start investing. We are offering more products, so they can choose from all kinds of products, including global equities,” he said.
“With our app, you can trade directly on NASDAQ,” he added, referring to the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, an American stock exchange based in New York City.
“You can deposit Thai baht on your account. We do the currency conversion, and we buy the American stocks directly for you. If you want to buy Apple [shares], you can buy it on our app,” he said.
Name change for new phase
Previously known as Country Group Securities, Pi Securities got its name changed in February 2022. That was the second name change for the company which was founded in 1966 and originally called Adkinson Securities – the third brokerage listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET).
“We changed our name to Pi Securities to reflect a new phase that we are going into when we are going to do the digital transformation. So, we felt that we wanted to have a new name to show that we are becoming a new company, a lot more fintech and digital company. Because that’s what we believe the future is going,” the CEO said.
As to why it is named “Pi”, he said there are two reasons. “One is because it helps to simplify very complex calculations in math. That’s what we do at Pi – we want to simplify very complex investments. The other one is that pi is an infinite number, so it means there’s infinite growth.”
He described Pi Securities as an independent retail broker that is not owned by any commercial bank. “We are the largest pure retail-focused independent broker,” he said.
The CEO also mentioned Pi Securities’ plan to expand beyond Thailand. “We are talking to multiple parties to see if we can expand beyond Thailand once we build the platform. We can do either partnerships or acquisitions in the rest of Southeast Asia. But we first focus on making it a success in Thailand. Once we do that, we’re going to look at other countries.”
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