Planto and P2P Finatech Partner to Tackle Thailand’s US$41 Billion SME Financing Gap with AI

^{ℹ️ News provided by: Planto Limited}

Planto and P2P Finatech are partnering to widen SME access to credit in Thailand using AI-powered cashflow analysis.

THAILAND, 12th October 2026 — Hong Kong-based AI fintech Planto and Thai lending platform P2P Finatech today announced a partnership to expand financing for Thailand’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — using artificial intelligence to help creditworthy businesses access the funding that traditional, collateral-based lending has long left behind.

A gap that has persisted for over a decade

SMEs are the backbone of Thailand’s economy — around 99% of all registered businesses, and the vast majority of its jobs. Yet they face a financing gap estimated at US$41 billion (IFC). And the gap is not closing: SMEs’ share of business lending has slipped to roughly 30%, and the SME loan book itself shrank (OECD).

The gap is structural, and it has proven stubborn. Banks lend primarily against collateral and struggle to assess small businesses that lack property to pledge or formal, reliable financial records. The result is a long-standing market imperfection: high-potential SMEs are judged “too risky” simply because their true financial health is hard to see. Repeated efforts have eased the problem at the margins, but the core barrier — how to evaluate an SME without collateral — has remained unsolved.

What Planto and P2P Finatech are doing

In simple terms, Planto provides Credit Insights to power P2P Finatech’s lending intelligence. Planto’s AI reads an SME’s financial documents — bank statements, invoices, tax filings and more — and turns them into clear, lender-ready signals: real cashflow, detected customers and suppliers, income stability and risk flags, in seconds. P2P Finatech uses these signals to assess and fund SMEs on how their business actually performs, rather than the collateral they can pledge — opening financing to creditworthy businesses that were previously overlooked.

What it means for Thailand’s SMEs

For SMEs, the significance is not simply a faster loan — it is being able to access credit at all. Many viable businesses are turned away today not because they are uncreditworthy, but because they cannot prove that they are. By making an SME’s real financial health visible, the platform gives these businesses a genuine path to funding for the first time.

The benefit also extends beyond that first loan. Business owners gain a clear view of their own operations and cashflow, and as they use the platform they aggregate their financial data and build up a financial profile and credit repayment history over time. Planto and P2P Finatech hope this will help more SMEs not only access credit today, but become more visible, fundable and resilient for the long term.

“Thai SMEs don’t lack potential — they lack a fair way to prove it. By combining our lending platform with Planto’s Credit Insights, we can look at a business’s real cashflow and fund the ones that deserve it. This partnership lets us extend responsible SME financing to businesses that traditional, collateral-based processes would simply turn away.”

— Supanut Ekteerajit, Founder, P2P Finatech

“An SME’s financial life is scattered across bank statements, invoices, tax filings and more — which is exactly why their true financial health is so hard to see. Planto’s Credit Insights piece that fragmented data together and turn it into a clear, reliable picture of how a business is really performing, making each SME’s real financial health visible so it can be understood and acted on. That is the capability we are proud to bring to Thailand.”

— Apinun Narkhan, Co-founder, Planto

A framework for the region

The need is not unique to Thailand. Across Southeast Asia, the MSME financing gap runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars — an estimated US$234 billion in Indonesia (IFC) and over US$206 billion in the Philippines (VISA). By showing that SMEs can be assessed on their real cashflow rather than their collateral, the partnership points to a framework the wider region could adopt to help close its SME funding gap.

About Planto

Planto is a Hong Kong-headquartered AI fintech building the intelligence layer for retail and SME banking. Through its B2B solutions, Planto has partnered with more than 15 financial institutions across Asia, turning fragmented financial data into decision-ready insight that powers engagement, lending and growth. Planto won MoneySurge 2026 at Money20/20 and the Asian Development Bank’s Fintech Innovation Challenge for leveraging AI for MSMEs in Thailand, and was selected to present at Thailand’s National Innovation Agency (NIA) Corporate SPARK 2026. https://www.planto.io/en/business/

About P2P Finatech

Short for “Power to People,” P2P Finatech is a Thailand-based lending platform focused on expanding access to financing for SMEs through an innovative credit approach. It connects borrowers with funding via working capital and invoice financing loans, and has distributed more than THB 600 million in loans, serving more than 40 Thai SMEs. https://p2pfinatech.co.th/

For more details, contact:

Planto: Apinun Narkhan, Co-founder, apinun@planto.io
P2P Finatech: Siravit Ekteerajit, Head of Strategy & Growth, siravit.e@p2pfinatech.com