A Microscopic View of Thailand’s Foreign Exchange Market: Players, Activities, and Networks

This paper explores Thailand’s foreign exchange (FX) market landscape by utilizing the Bank of Thailand’s supervisory Financial Market Statistics (FMST) data which covers the universe of onshore foreign exchange transactions in Thailand. Historical developments regarding different groups of market players and the use of foreign exchange instruments, as well as the overall market structure are documented. Through the lens of network analysis, we also provide topological descriptions of Thailand’s FX market landscape, with applications on interbank network stability. We observe low degree of concentration among the dealer banks in terms of market turnover share. In contrast, from a customer’s perspective, market share is highly concentrated within a handful of large FX customers. The network connectivity among different groups of players suggests that the Thai FX market is one that is rather segmented and clustered among similar players. A substantial degree of specialization is evident across banks in terms of FX instruments and market segments, both in the interbank network and in the retail market. Probing into the interbank network stability, we find a small subset of banks to be truly central to the FX market network, though the system appears to hold up well in stress times supported by fluidity among interbank players.