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Forth Smart connects rural economies using Oracle Cloud

Thailand’s Forth Smart Corporation uses Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Machine Learning and Oracle Analytics to improve operations and test new offers in its fleet of kiosk which bring electronic banking to rural areas.

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INDUSTRY: Financial Services

LOCATION: Thailand

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About the customer

Connecting people

In rural Thailand, cash is king. Salaries are paid and rent is handed over in bills and coins. Markets, restaurants, taxis, and buses all expect cash.

Yet nearly everyone also carries a mobile phone, and Forth Smart sees opportunity in providing kiosks that connect the digital and cash economies. Forth Smart has more than 120,000 vending kiosks dotting local bodegas, schools, even in fishing villages and local community centers, where people bring cash to top off prepaid mobile phones, or increasingly, fund ewallet apps like Apple Pay or Google Pay. Equally important: The kiosks allow rural dwellers and urban relatives to quickly send money to each other, especially in times of emergency.

Ninety percent of Forth Smart’s kiosks are in rural areas, where 30 percent of Thailand’s labor force works in agriculture.

Using Autonomous Database with Oracle Machine Learning inside, we were able to reduce query time from three hours to minutes, and increase our customer ad conversion rates by 2X to 3X. This allows us to better utilize our marketing budget and effort.

Pawarit (Taa) Ruengsuksilp, Business Development Analyst, Forth Smart

Customer Story

Empowered analysts

With 300 employees supporting 120,000 banking kiosks spread throughout rural Thailand, Forth Smart runs a lean operation.

Its popular kiosks—which started as a way to let people use cash and coins to top off prepaid mobile phones and transfer funds between friends and relatives—now offer a greatly expanded number of services and ebanking functions. And with more than 15 million users, the kiosks have become prime real estate for advertisements and offers for internet packages.

Forth Smart needs real-time insight into customer behavior on its kiosk network, which handles more than 2 million transactions a day. To get that insight, while also securing the data, Forth Smart uses Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, without a database administrator.

Forth Smart business analysts also use Oracle Analytics to apply machine-learning algorithms to understand customer segments and predict how an offer will fare—resulting in doubling the ad conversion rate.