Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have given the green light to SE Digital, a subsidiary of Bangkok-based Seamico Securities Plc (ZIMCO), to provide a fully regulated Initial Coin Offering (ICO) platform. Initial reports suggest SE Digital will launch their own investment token valued around THB 3 billion (USD $98 million).
As an official ICO Portal, SE Digital will vet and advise potential companies who wish to market their own digital tokens before allowing them to be offered to the public. Buyers of any tokens from the platform will be required to undergo customer due diligence (CDD) procedures and adhere to know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.
New Fundraising Alternative
The ICO portal structure was first publicised in the summer of 2018 and was seen as a way to reduce fraud in the market by providing some legitimacy to any project seeking tokenisation.
SE Digital’s CEO, Jesadavat Priebjrivat, told the Bangkok Post that the FinTech’s new ICO portal will “…promote the tokenisation of traditional assets providing investors with access to previously illiquid and difficult to access assets such as commercial real estate and investment products with global exposure, while offering issuers with a new fundraising alternative that allows access to a wider pool of capital providers with cost savings accrued from the digitisation on the blockchain.”
Stephen Ng, Chief Marketing Officer at SE Digital, outlined how the portal may impact the ASEAN investment sector by saying, “As asset tokenisation fully takes hold, it will help bolster innovation and competitiveness of Thailand’s capital markets.”
Ng believes that such a transformation would be beneficial to individuals as well as public and private companies as it would provide “…greater access to capital information and new investment opportunities, enhancing transparency, and automating of costly compliance requirements.”
